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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND 
CHRISTIAN BELIEF 



THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND 
CHRISTIAN BELIEF 



GEORGE PARK FISHER, D.D., LL.D. 

EMERITUS PBOFE880B OF ECCLESIASTICAL UI8T0BY 
IN TALK UNIVEB8ITY 



REVISED EDITION : IN GREAT PART REWRITTEN 



> J ' , i 1 1 « > 






NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1902 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

T>o CowtB ReoBvED 

OCT. g^ 190? 

CnPVPMUHT EUTffV 

Ct^AS ^JU XXo No. 
COPY 6. 



COPYRIGHT, 1883, 1902, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published Octobeb,, 1902. 



Norboooti ^usz 

3. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U. S. A. 



WILLIAM SANDAY D.D., LL.D. 

LADY MARGARET PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY AT OXFORD 

AND CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH 

WHOSE WRITINGS ARE AN EXAMPLE TO CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARS 

OF THOROUGH INVESTIGATION AND FAULTLESS CANDOR 

^Tijis Uolumc is JBctiicatcti 



PREFACE 

When I found that this book after a score of years since its 
publication was still widely read at home and abroad, I felt 
something like an obligation to put it in a form more consonant 
with what I should wish to say at present. I have done much 
in revising and recasting its contents, especially since gaining 
as emeritus professor the continuity of time so favorable to 
literary work. The leading propositions in the book will not be 
found to be materially altered. The arguments in support of 
them have experienced modifications of some importance, and 
still more the language in which they are set forth. The rela- 
tions of Christian Theism to natural and physical science are 
more elaborately discussed than in the earlier edition. The 
same is true of the evidence pertaining to the origin and author- 
ship of the Gospels. In preparing to take up anew the first of 
these main topics, I. have resorted to the writings of naturalists 
of the best repute and been aided by personal converse with 
adepts in these branches. I have meant to treat with just 
respect the authority of these sources of knowledge. At the 
same time every discerning student understands the necessity 
of drawing a line between the real data of science, with the 
conclusions fairly deduced and the metaphysics often mingled 
pretty largely in treatises which, on their own ground, may be 
safe guides. 

By German scholars, some of them of much celebrity, it is 
felt to be high time to utter a protest against what had grown 
to be a disrespect, as prevalent as it is unreasonable, for early 
ecclesiastical tradition relative to the date of New Testament 
writings. The reaction against the moribund formula of the 
impeccability of Scripture even outside the limits of moral and 
religious doctrine has opened the door to a boundless field of 
conjecture in handling the New Testament narratives, both as 
to the Introduction and in the special precinct of exegesis. 
Upon this license a sounder Biblical criticism is called upon to 
impose a proper restraint. In reference to the New Testament 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

narratives, I see no reason for setting aside the traditional 
ascription of the book of Acts — including the passages from a 
fellow-traveller of Paul, speaking in the first person — to the 
authorship of Luke, the writer of the third Gospel. Nor am I 
convinced of the non-apostolic or composite authorship of the 
fourth Gospel. The suggestion, for one thing, that there was a 
confusion of names on the part of Irenaeus — a mistaking by 
him in the discourses of Polycarp of one John when another 
was meant — appears to me improbable in the extreme. The 
inference, based on the Synoptics, for the negative position on 
the question of authorship strikes me as resting on misinterpre- 
tation of the first three Gospels, and an indefensible scepticism 
concerning additional matter contained in the fourth. 

Of the two branches of Christian Evidences, the internal or 
moral, and the external proof from miracles, it will be seen that 
the precedence is accorded to the former. This is a point of 
difference from the older method usual in the school of Paley. 
In truth they are two mutually supporting species of evidence. 

I abstain, in deference to what might be their preference, to 
mention the names of friends whom I have consulted with profit 
in the composition and issue of this work. I must be allowed 
to make one exception, and to express my thanks to Professor 
Charles J. H. Ropes, of Bangor, who has kindly read the proof- 
sheets of several chapters, respecting which his learning and 
accuracy were especially helpful. 

I must expect that, among the readers who may be interested 
in the general subject of this volume, some will be less attracted 
by the sections that are concerned with the philosophical objec- 
tions to theism, or with the details of critical evidence on the 
genuineness of the Gospels. But even this class, I trust, will 
find the major part of the book not altogether ill-suited to their 
wants. I venture to indulge the hope that they may derive 
from it some aid in clearing up perplexities, and some new 
light upon the nature of the Christian faith and its relation to 
the Scriptures. Fortunately readers as well as teachers are at 
liberty to exercise the right of omission. 

G. P. F. 

Yai.e University, 
October, 1902. 



EXTRACTS FROM THE PREFACE TO 
THE FIRST EDITION 

This volume embraces a discussion of the evidences of both 
natural and revealed religion. Prominence is given to topics 
having special interest at present from their connection with 
modern theories and difficulties. With respect to the first divi- 
sion of the work, the grounds of the belief in God, it hardly 
need be said that theists are not all agreed as to the method to 
be pursued, and as to what arguments are of most weight in the 
defence of this fundamental truth. I can only say of these 
introductory chapters, that they are the product of long study 
and reflection. The argument of design and the bearing of 
evolutionary doctrine on its validity are fully considered. It 
is made clear, I believe, that no theory of evolution which is 
not pushed to the extreme of materialism and fatalism — dog- 
mas which lack all scientific warrant — weakens the proof from 
final causes. In dealing with antitheistic theories, the agnostic 
philosophy, partly from the show of logic and of system which 
it presents, partly from the guise of humility which it wears, — 
not to speak of the countenance given it by some naturalists of 
note, — seemed to call for particular attention. One radical 
question in the conflict with atheism is whether man himself is 
really a personal being, whether he has a moral history distinct 
from a merely natural history. If he has not, then it is idle to 
talk about theism, but equally idle to talk about the data of 
ethics. Ethics must share the fate of religion. How can there 
be serious belief in responsible action when man is not free, 
and is not even a substantial entity ? If this question were dis- 
posed of, further difficulties, to be sure, would be left in the 
path of agnostic ethics. How can self-seeking breed benevo- 
lence, or self-sacrifice and the sense of duty spring out of the 



X FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

" struggle for existence " ? Another radical question is that of 
the reality of knowledge. Are things truly knowable ? Or is 
what we call knowledge a mere phantasmagoria, produced we 
know not by what? This is the creed which some one has 
aptly formulated in the Shakespearean lines : — 

" We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

In the second division of the work the course pursued is 
different from that usually taken by writers on the Evidences 
of Revelation. A natural effect of launching an ordinary in- 
quirer at once upon a critical investigation of the authorship of 
the Gospels is to bewilder his mind among patristic authorities 
that are strange to him. I have preferred to follow, though 
with an opposite result, the general method adopted of late by 
noted writers of the sceptical schools. I have undertaken to 
show that when w^e take the Gospels as they stand, prior to 
researches into the origin of them, the miraculous element 
in the record is found to carry in it a self-verifying character. 
On the basis of w^hat must be, and actually is, conceded, the 
conclusion cannot be avoided that the miracles occurred. This 
vantage-ground once fairly gained, the matter of the authorship 
and date of the Gospels can be explored without the bias which 
a prejudice against the miraculous elements in the narrative 
creates against its apostolic origin. Then it remains to estab- 
lish the truthfulness of the apostolic witnesses, and, further, to 
vindicate the supernatural features of the Gospel history from 
the objection that is suggested by the stories of pagan miracles 
and by the legends of the saints. ... In earlier and later 
chapters I have sought to direct the reader into lines of reflec- 
tion which may serve to impress him with the truth contained 
in the remark that the strongest proof of Christianity is afforded 
by Christianity itself and by Christendom as an existing fact. 

G. P. F. 



CONTENTS 



CHArTER I 
The Personalitt of God and of Man : The Self-revelation 



OF God in the Human Soul 

The Two Beliefs associated 

The Essentials of Personality . 

The Reality of Self .... 

Self-determination .... 

Theories of Necessity and Determinism 

The Consciousness of Moral Law 

The Aspiration to commune with God 

Instincts of Feeling as Indicative of Truth 

The Belief in Immortality . 

The Place of Will in Religious Faith 

Anticipative Presentiment in Religion 



PAGE 

1 

2 

2 

3 

5 

16 

18 

20 

20 

20 

22 



CHAPTER II 

The Arguments for the Being of God: Their Function in 
General and as Severally considered 



The Ultimate Source of Belief in God 

Tlie Intuition of the Absolute . 

The Ontological Argument 

The Cosmological Argument 

The Uncaused Being a Voluntary Agent . 

Disproof of Polytheism .... 

The Argument from Design : its Significance 

The a priori Basis of this Argument 

Mind Discernible in Nature 

Science the Reflex of Mind in Nature 

Distinction between Order and Design 

Teleology Evident in Plants 

Teleology most Manifest in Animal Organisms 

Objections to the Design-argument answered 

The Four Criticisms suggested by Kant . 

The Hypothesis of Chance 

xi 



24 

24 
26 
27 
28 
29 
30 
32 
33 
34 
35 
36 
37 
38 
42 
43 



\i 



Xli CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Evolution and Design : Meaning of Evolution . . * . . 45 

Design-argument strengthened by Evolution 46 

Teleology and Mechanism , , .49 

Variability in Organisms .49 

Darwin on Variability and Design . . . . . . . 49 

Respecting the Attributes of God 63 

The Moral Argument . . . . . . . . ,55 

The Problem of Evil 56 

The Historical Argument , . .59 

Personality consistent with Infinitude . . . . . .60 

The World like Man for a Purpose . . . . , . ,62 

CHAPTER III 

The Principal Anti-theistio Theories : Pantheism, Positivism, 
Materialism, Agnosticism 

The Four Terms defined 63 

What is Pantheism ? .63 

The System of Spinoza 63 

The German Systems of Ideal Pantheism 65 

No Place in Pantheism for Free Choice or Responsibility ... 67 

Positivism : Not Self-consistent 67 

J. S. Mill's Modifications of Positivism 68 

Materialism 68 

Relation of Consciousness to Physical States 69 

Materialism a Self -destructive Theory 70 

The Doctrine of " Conscious Automatism " . ... , .71 

The Agnostic System of Spencer ,72 

Spencer's Theory of Evolution examined .74 

Later Expressions of Spencer 77 

Agnosticism the Destruction of Science 78 

Untenable Identification of Mind and Matter 79 

The Question of the Reality of Knowledge 82 

Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant 83 

Hamilton and Mansel . . 84 

Mill's Revival of Hume's Speculations 86 

Relation of Spencer to Hume and Mill 86 

How Philosophy to escape from its Aberrations .... 88 

CHAPTER IV 

The Divine Origin of Christianity evinced in its Adapted- 
ness to the Deepest Necessities op Man 

The Practical Test of Christianity 89 

The Soul's Need of God 90 



CONTENTS 



XUl 



The Feeling awakened in the Miseries of Life 
The Experience of Goethe. Letter of Carlyle 
The Consciousness of Sin and Guilt . 
The Consciousness of Moral Bondage 
Recognition in the Bible of the Facts of Life 
Reconciliation to God through the Gospel 
Filial Union to God through Christ . 
Peace and Victory over the World . 



PAOB 

91 

92 
92 
94 
96 

96 
98 
98 



CHAPTER V 

The Divine Mission of Jesus attested by the Transforming 
Agency of Christianity in Human Society 

The Power of Christianity evinced in its Progress .... 99 

The Beneficence of its Influence 100 

Prediction of the Nature and Effect of its Progress .... 101 

New Ideal of Man and Society 101 

Christianity and the Family 103 

Christianity and the State 104 

Christianity and Liberty 104 

Christianity and International Relations 107 

Christianity and Charity 108 

Christianity and Social Reform 113 



CHAPTER VI 

The Evidence of the Divine Origin of Christianity from its 
Ethical and Religious Teaching and from the Comparison 
of it with the Greek Philosophy 

Through Christianity the Kingdom of God made Universal . . 115 

Seeds of Truth in the Teaching of Jesus 116 

In his Teaching Religion and Morality Inseparable .... 116 

Christian Precepts not merely Negative 117 

In the Gospel Particular Obligations not Undervalued . . .117 

Active as well as Passive Virtues enjoined 118 

Christianity distinctively a Religion 119 

The Greek Philosophy as an Intellectual Achievement . . .119 

The Greek Philosophy a Preparation for the Gospel .... 120 

Socrates and his Teachings compared with the Gospel . . . 120 

Plato and his Doctrines compared with the Gospel .... 122 

Aristotle and his Doctrines compared with the Gospel . . . 126 

Greek Systems become Practical 128 

The Theology and Ethics of Epicurus 129 

The Characteristic Principles of Stoicism 129 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



The Special Character of Roman Stoicism 

The Teaching of Seneca and its Sources . 

Stoic Teachings compared with Christianity 

New Platonism : Philosophy lapses into Pantheism 

The Actual Aids of Philosophy Insufficient 

Its Imperfect Conception of God . . 



PAGE 

131 
132 
133 
137 
139 
141 



CHAPTER VII 

The Consciousness in Jesus of a Supernatural Calling 
rendered credible by his sinless character 

The Eacts of the Gospel indirectly verified 142 

The Credibility of the Testimony of Jesus respecting himself . . 1 44 

The Alternatives of Credence Untenable 144 

Summary of this Testimony of Jesus 145 

Proof of the Sanity and Sobriety of Jesus 146 

No Credulity then to warrant Disbelief now 148 

Words and Actions of Jesus consonant with his Claims . . . 150 
The Sinless Character of Jesus insures Self-knowledge . . .151 

The Character of Jesus tried by Temptation ..... 152 

His Sinlessness Plain to his Enemies 153 

Unison of Virtues in his Character . 154 

His Ereedom from Self-accusation .155 

Moral Criticism of his Character Baseless 156 

His Character tested by his Experience 159 

The Direct Probative Weight of his Sinlessness .... 161 



CHAPTER VIII 

Miracles : Their Nature, Credibility, and Place in 
Christian Evidences 

Revelation in Nature and Providence presupposed in Christianity 

Consistency of the Two Revelations . 

The Gospel not an Afterthought of the Creator 

The Purpose of the Christian Miracles 

The Untheistic Conception of Nature 

The Relation of Miracles to the Constancy of Nature 

The Credibility of Miracles : Hume's Objection 

Huxley's Criticism of Hume .... 

Criticism of Huxley's Position .... 

The "Order of Nature " not disturbed by a Miracle 

Nature of the Miracle-working Power of Jesus . 

Precedence in the Proofs of Christianity belongs not to Miracles 

Value of the Proof from Miracles 



163 
163 
164 
165 
165 
167 
168 
170 
170 
173 
173 
174 
175 



CONTENTS 



XV 



CHAPTER IX 

Proof of the Miracles of Christ independently of Special 
Inquiry into the Authorship of the Gospels 

PACE 

Miracles professed to be wrought by the Apostles . . . .178 
The Injunctions of Jesus not to report Miracles .... 180 
Cautions against an Excessive Esteem of Miracles .... 182 

Teachings of Jesus Inseparable from Miracles 183 

Not True that Miracles then excited no Surprise .... 188 
No Miracles said to be wrought by Jesus prior to his Ministry . 189 

The Persistence of the Apostles' Faith an Evidence of Miracles . 189 
Miracles inwoven with the Nexus of Occurrences .... 190 
Evidence of the Fact of the Resurrection of Jesus . . . .192 

Criticism of the " Vision Theory " 194 

The Criteria of Hallucination Absent 196 

Keim's Denial of the Vision Theory 197 

Keim's Admission of a miraculous Self-manifestation of Jesus . 199 

The Naturalistic Theory of the Miracles Obsolete . . . .199 

Strauss' s Contempt for this Theory 200 

Strauss's Mythical Theory 200 

Renan's Imputation of Conscious Deceit ...... 201 

Christian Evidences not Demonstrative : to be taken Collectively . 203 



CHAPTER X 

The Gospels an Authentic Record of the Testimony given 

BY THE Apostles 

Authorship and Date of the Gospels : "Why so Important . . 204 

Record of Miracles not a Ground for Distrust 204 

Special Proofs of the Genuineness of the Gospels .... 204 

Authority of the Four acknowledged in the Churches . . . 205 

But not dictated by Any Organization 205 

Testimony of Irenseus 205 

Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Muratorian Canon . , . 206 

Representative Character of Individuals 207 

Value of Testimony of Irenseus 207 

Objections to the Witness of Irenaeus answered .... 209 

Justin Martyr : his Memoirs 211 

Outlines of his References to the Gospels 212 

Why he quotes mainly from the Synoptics 214 

Few References in J. without Parallelisms in the Gospels . .215 

His Memoirs substantially Coincident with the Gospels . . .217 

His Quotations not exceptionally Inexact 219 

His Memoirs specially refer to the Four 220 



xvi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Tatian's Diatesseron 222 

The Non-canonical Writings held in Honor 222 

Apocryphal Gospels 223 

The Gnostics had no Competitors with the Four .... 224 

Celsus an Indirect Witness for the Four 226 

Papias : his Testimony . . . . . . . ' , . 226 

The Logia of Matthew . . 228 

Marcion acknowledged the Four 229 

The Prologue of the Third Gospel 230 

Internal Evidence in the First Three Gospels 231 

The Prophetic Discourse of Jesus 232 

Other Water-marks of Age 283 

The Mutual Relation of the Synoptics 234 

The Integrity of the Gospels 235 

The Credibility and Lukan Authorship of the Acts .... 237 

Comparison of the Earlier and the Later Chapters .... 238 

The " Speaking with Tongues " 239 

The Speeches in Acts 240 

The Apostolic Conference, Acts xv. , compared with Gal. ii. . . 241 

Paul's Rebuke of Peter .242 

Decisive Proof the Verity of Acts xv 243 

CHAPTER XI 

The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel 

Unlikeness of the Fourth Gospel to the Synoptics .... 245 

Usual Belief respecting the Apostle John ...... 245 

The Apostolic Authorship until recently Virtually undisputed . . 246 
The Tubingen School : The Theory of Baur . . . . .247 

A much Earlier Date of the Gospel at Present granted . . . 249 

Early References to Ancient Classics often Scanty .... 250 

Evidence offered by Parties outside of the Church .... 253 

Hypothesis that the Apostle was confounded with "the Presbyter" 254 

Did Irenseus misunderstand Polycarp ? 254 

What is known of the " Presbyter John " ? 257 

Theory of a Confusion of Names Improbable 258 

The Asian Residence and Influence of the Apostle . . . . 258 

Testimony of the Gospel, ch. xxi 262 

The Alogi 263 

Hypothesis that Disciples of John wrote the Gospel .... 265 

The Hypothesis of a Composite Authorship : Wendt . . . 266 

The Unity of Authorship Evident 268 

Partition Theories excluded by John xxi. 24 .... . 260 

Internal Evidences 270 



CONTENTS xvii 

PAGE 

The Author a Palestinian Hebrew 270 

Tlie Author's Name not mentioned 271 

The Author an Eye-witness 271 

The Gospel virtually an Autobiography 274 

The Author's Personal Love to Jesus 275 

The Author's References to " The Jews " 275 

Bearing of Other N. T. Documents on the Question .... 277 

The Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel 277 

Frequency of Wrong Inferences from Diversity of Style . . . 278 

Theory of Allegorical Facts Untenable 279 

Examples of Historical Reminiscences in the Gospel . . . 280 

Kenan's Citations of the Same Character 281 

Critical Objections based on Misinterpretation 282 

The Author's Estimate of Miracles ....... 283 

Theological Aspect of the Gospel 283 

The Gospel and Alexandrian Judaism ...... 284 

Comparison of the " Logos " Doctrine in John and in Philo . . 284 

Observations of Harnack on this Topic 285 

Observations of Loofs on the Topic . 286 

John and the Synoptics 289 

Frequent Misconception of the Design and Character of the Synoptics 289 

A Certain Subjective (not Fictitious) Element in John . . . 290 

The Duration of the Ministry of Jesus 291 

The Cleansing of the Temple 292 

The Date of the Crucifixion 292 

The Doings and Sayings of John the Baptist 294 

The Message of the Baptist to Jesus 297 

Import of the Conversation at Caesarea-Philippi .... 298 

The Method of Jesus in disclosing his Messiahship .... 300 

The Discourses of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel 301 

Mistaken Objections from their Character 301 

The Theology of the Synoptics and John not essentially Different . 304 

The Character of Ancient Pseudonymous Writings .... 306 

The Theory of a Close Relation of the Evangelist to the Apostle . 307 

The View of Weizsacker 307 

The View of Harnack 308 

The Choice between Two Hypotheses 309 

CHAPTER XII 

The Trustworthiness of the Apostles' Testimony as pre- 
sented BY THE Evangelists 

Not a Question respecting Inspiration 310 

The Choice of the Apostles : Their Function 310 



XVlll 



CONTENTS 



The Apostles consciously called to be Witnesses 

The Apostles always consciously Disciples 

Frankly relate Instances of their own Ignorance and Weakness 

Relate their Mistakes and the Reproofs of Jesus 

Relate their Serious Delinquencies ..... 

Narrate Instances of Sinless Infirmity in Jesus 

Submit to Extreme Suffering and Death .... 

The Suspicion of Dishonesty in the Apostles Absurd 

To impute to them Self-delusion is Unreasonable 

Their Testimony not shaken by the Narration of Miracles 

Answer of Bishop Butler to Sceptics on this Subject 

The Accounts of the Birth and Early Life of Jesus . 

The Gospels not moulded by a Doctrinal Bias . 

The Mythical Theory not Less Untenable 



PAGE 

312 
313 
313 
316 
315 
316 
317 
318 
318 
319 
319 
319 
320 
321 



CHAPTER XIII 

The Relation of the Christian Faith to the Bible and 
TO Biblical Criticism 

Does Critical Science imperil the Foundations of Christianity ? . 322 

The Bible the Source of Christian Knowledge 322 

Its Life-giving Power 322 

Special Problems and Distinctions respecting the Bible . . . 323 

Origin of Rigid Maxims on Biblical Inerrancy 323 

Distinction between the Bible and Christianity .... 324 

Revelation in and through a Process of Redemption . . . 324 

Revelation Historical in the Ancient and the N. T, Periods . . 325 

Persons and Transactions in Revelation prior to the Scriptures . 327 

The Occasion of the N. T. Writings .327 

Composed to meet the Wants of the Churches 328 

The Kingdom of God the Fundamental Reality .... 328 

The Religious Consciousness of the Hebrew People .... 329 

The End of the Kingdom the Transformation of Human Society . 331 

The Rise of a Spiritual and Universal Community .... 332 

Illustration from Secular Life and History 332 

Obscurity as to the Beginnings of Old Kingdoms . . . . 334 

No Formulas as to the Scriptures in the Ancient Creeds . . . 335 

Literary Questions as to the Scriptures 335' 

Organic Connection of Christianity with the O. T. Religion . . 336 

Open Historical Questions in 0. T. Annals ..... 336 

Questions as to the Rise and Successive Eras of the O. T. Religion . 337 

Moses the Founder of Hebrew Legislation 338 

Critical Investigation Consistent with Christian Belief . . . 340 



X 



CONTENTS 



XIX 



The Authority of Jesus and of the Apostles 
Butler against dogmatizing on the Authority of Scripture 
The Apostles' Insight into the Gospel Progressive . 
The Order of Things to be believed 



PAGE 

342 

342 
342 

342 



CHAPTER XIV 

The Gradualness of Revelation 

The Declaration of Jesus to this Effect 

Progress of Interpretation not Continuance of Revelation 

The Process of Historic Revelation in its Contents 

The Epochs of Law and of Grace 

Progress in the Conception of God 

Progress in the Doctrine of Divine Providence . 

Gradual Unfolding of the Mercifulness of God . 

The Lesson from Jonah : The Prediction of Micah 

The Problem of Suffering 

The Discussions in Job 

The Reflections in Ecclesiastes .... 
Light in the Gospel on the Problem of Suffering 
The Gradual Revelation of Immortality . 
Gradual Exposition of the Nature of Sacrifice . 
Progress in the Messianic Conception 
Progressive Advance of Ethics in Revealed Religion 
Gradual Enthronement of the Law of Love 
Imprecations in the Old Testament . 
Accommodation in Law to Ages of Ignorance . 
Progress in the N. T. Revelation 
The Promise of Light through the Spirit . 
The Progress of the Apostles in Enlightenment 
Authority only Predicable of the Bible as a Whole 



344 
345 
345 
347 

348 
350 
352 
353 
353 
354 
355 
356 
357 
359 
3(50 
361 
362 
363 
364 
365 
368 
369 
369 



CHAPTER XV 

The Relation of Christianity to Other Religions 

Classification of Religions 371 

Christian View of Ethnic Religions 371 

Christianity the Absolute Religion 372 

Revelation the Self-revelation of God 372 

In Christianity Alone a Full View of the Perfection of God . . 373 

Polytheism and Monotheism 373 

Mohammedanism .......... 375 

The Religion of India 376 



XX 



CONTENTS 



Brahmanism Pantheistic 

Buddha and Buddhism 

The Merits of Buddha and Buddhism . . . 

Buddha in what Sense a Pessimist ....... 

Neither a Personal God nor Immortality Parts of his Teaching 

The Degeneration of Buddhism . 

Alleged Parallelisms between Hindoo Religions and Christianity 
Fitness of Christianity to be the Religion of Mankind 
The Religion of the Old Testament and of the New, a Divine Revela- 
tion . . . 



PAGE 

377 
377 
379 
380 
380 
381 
381 
383 

383 



Note 


1 (p. 23). 


Note 


2 (p. 49). 


Note 


3 (p. 50). 


Note 


4 (p. 56). 


Note 


5 (p. 66), 


Note 


6 (p. 82). 


Note 


7 (p. 83). 


Note 


8 (p. 86). 


Note 


9 (p. 93). 


Note 10 (p. 167) 



Note 11 (p. 172). 
Note 12 (p. 231). 
Note 13 (p. 252). 
Note 14 (p. 254). 

Note 15 (p. 269). 
Note 16 (p. 272). 
Note 17 (p. 280). 
Note 18 (p. 289). 

Note 19 (p. 305). 

Note 20 (p. 320). 
Note 21 (p. 203). 
Note 22 (p. 343). 

Note 23 (p. 343). 



APPENDIX 

Further Discussion of the Origin of Religion . 387 

Other Statements of Huxley on Teleology . , 394 

Other Statements of Darwin on Design in Nature 396 

Further Remarks on the Problem of Evil . . 397 

Professor Eraser on the Spread of Pantheism . 398 

Spencer's Modification of Views on Correlation . 399 
Science the Discovery of the Principles and Laws 

of Nature 399 

Matthew Arnold's Conception of God . . . 401 

Possible Force of Self-accusation . . . 403 
The Trend of Philosophy toward Objective 

Idealism . 404 

The Philosophical Opinions of Huxley . . 406 

Unity of Authorship of the Acts . . . 408 

Resch on the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel . 410 
Neander on the Johannine Authorship of the 

Fourth Gospel 410 

Haupt on Dislocations in the Fourth Gospel . 411 

The Designation " Disciple whom Jesus loved" 412 

Striking Reminiscence in the Fourth Gospel . 412 
Professor Thayer on the Apostolic Authorship 

of the Fourth Gospel 412 

Weizsacker and Thayer on the Divinity of Christ 

in the Gospels 412 

The Subject of Discrepancies in the Gospels . 413 
Heathen and Ecclesiastical Miracles . . .421 
The Relation of Biblical Teaching to Natural 

Science 435 

The Relation of Biblical Criticism to Prophecy . 447 



THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND 
CHRISTIAN BELIEF 



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dSwarov eTvat r; 7ray;^aAe7rov Tt, to fievTOL av ra Aeyd/xeva Trept avTotv p,^ 
ov;(t TravTt rpoTTio €Aey;(etv /cat p,^ 7rpoacf)LarTa(r9aL, irplv av TravTa)(rj cTKOTrwv 
aTrecpr) Tts, Travv ixaXOaKOV etvat av8pos • Setv yap Trept ai'To, eV ye' Tt toutcdv 
SunrpdiaorOat, y fxaOeiv otttj €;!(et 17 evpetv ^, et TavTa dSwaTov , tov yoiiv 
PcXtlutov tCjv dv6po}7rLvo)v Xoyoiv Xa/Sovra kol Svae^cXcyKTOTaTov, iirl 
TOVTOv 6)(ovfJL€vov wcTTTep CTTt O'^^eSux? KtvSwcwvTtt 8ta7rAevo"at TOV ^LOV, €t 
fxrj Tts SwatTO 6.cr(f>aX€(TT€pov kol aKivSwoTepov CTrt ^e^aiOTepov o^^p^- 
TO?, Xdyov ^et'ov Ttvo?, StaTropevOrjvai. kol Sy) kol vvv eycoye ovk CTrat- 
o-^vvOyaofxaL epiaOai, CTretS^ Kat o^u Ta{)Ta Aeyet?, ov8' ipxivTov aiTid(Top.ai 
iv v(TTepo) XP^^V ^'^'' ^^^ ^^'^ CLTTOV a ifxol SoKct. Plato, Phcedo, 85 [the 
topic being ' The Concerns of the Soul.'] 

" Vert good, Socrates," said Simmias ; " then I will tell you my dif- 
ficulty, and Cebes will tell you his. I feel myself (and I daresay that 
you have the same feeling) how hard or rather impossible is the attain- 
ment of any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. 
And yet I should deem him a coward who did not prove what is said 
about them to the uttermost, or whose heart failed him before he had 
examined them on every side. For he should persevere until he has 
achieved one of two things : either he should discover, or be taught, 
the truth about them ; or, if this be impossible, I would have him take 
the best and most irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft 
upon which he sails through life — not without risk, as I admit, if he 
cannot find some word of God which will more surely and safely carry 
him. And now, as you bid me, I will venture to question you, and then 
I shall not have to reproach myself hereafter with not having said at the 
time what I think. For when I consider the matter, either alone or with 
Cebes, the argument does certainly appear to me, Socrates, to be not 
sufficient." — From the Version of Jowett, ed. 3. 

" The only question concerning the truth of Christianity is, whether it 
be a real revelation, not whether it be attended with every circumstance 
which we should have looked for ; and concerning the authority of Scrip- 
ture, whether it be what it claims to be, not whether it be a book of such 
sort, and so promulgated as weak men are apt to fancy a book containing 
divine revelation should. And therefore neither obscurity, nor seeming 
inaccuracy of style, nor various readings, nor early disputes about the 
authors of particular parts, nor any other things of the like kind, though 
they had been much more considerable in degree than they are, could 
overthrow the authority of Scripture ; unless the prophets, or apostles, or 
our Lord, had promised that the book containing the divine revelation 
should be secure from these things." — Bishop Butler, Analogy, Part 
11. chap. Hi. 



xxii 



THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND 
CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

CHAPTER I 

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN : THE SELF-REVELATION OF 
GOD IN THE HUMAN SOUL 

Theism signifies not only that there is a ground or cause of all 
things, — SO much every one who makes an attempt to account 
for himself and for the world around him admits, — but also that 
the Cause of all things thus presupposed is a personal Being, of 
whom an image is presented in the human mind. This image falls 
short of being adequate, only as it involves limits, — limits, how- 
ever, which cleave not to intelligence in itself, but simply to intel- 
ligence in its finite form. 

Behef in the personality of man, and belief in the personality of 
God, stand or fall together. A glance at the history of religion 
would suggest that these two beliefs are for some reason insepa- 
rable. Where faith in the personality of God is weak, or is altogether 
wanting, as in the case of the pantheistic religions of the East, the 
perception which men have of their own personality is found to be 
in an equal degree indistinct. The feeling of individuality is dor- 
mant. The soul indolently ascribes to itself a merely phenomenal 
being. It conceives of itself as appearing for a moment, like a 
wavelet on the ocean, to vanish again in the all-ingulfing essence 
whence it emerged. Philosophical theories which substitute mat- 
ter, or an impersonal Idea, or an " Unknowable," for the self- 
conscious Deity, likewise dissipate the personality of man as ordi- 
narily conceived. If they disown the tenet that God is a Spirit, 
they decline with equal emphasis to affirm that man is a spirit. 
The pantheistic and atheistic schemes are in this respect con- 
sistent in their logic. Out of man's perception of his own per- 
sonal attributes arises the belief in a personal God. On this fact 



2 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

of our own personality the validity of the evidence for theism is 
conditioned. 

The essential characteristics of personality are self-consciousness 
and self-determination ; that is to say, these are the elements com- 
mon to all spiritual beings. Perception, whether its object be 
material or mental, involves a perceiving subject. The " cogito 
ergo sum " of Descartes is not properly an argument. I do not 
deduce my existence from the fact of my putting forth an act of 
thought. The Cartesian maxim simply denotes that in the act the 
agent is of necessity brought to light, or disclosed to himself. He 
becomes cognizant of himself in the fluctuating states of thought, 
feehng, and volition. This apprehension of self is intuitive. It is 
conditioned on experience. It is not a possession of infancy. 
Yet it is not an idea of self that emerges, not a bare phenomenon, as 
some philosophers have imagined ; but the ego is immediately pre- 
sented, and there is an inexpugnable conviction of its reality. 
Idealism, or the doctrine that sense-perception is a modification 
of the mind that is due exclusively to its own nature, and is elicited 
by nothing exterior to itself, is, if anything, less repugnant to reason 
than is the denial of the reality of the ego. Whatever may be true 
of external things, of self we have an intuitive knowledge. If I 
judge that there is no real table before me on which I seem to be 
writing, and no corporeal organs for seeing or touching it, I never- 
theless cannot escape the conviction that it is /who thus judge. 
To talk of thought without a thinker, of belief without a behever, 
is to utter words void of meaning. The indivisible unity and 
permanent identity of the ego are necessarily involved in self-con- 
sciousness. I know myself as a single, separate entity. Personal 
identity is presupposed in every act of memory. Go back as far 
as recollection can carry us, it is the same self who was the subject 
of all the mental experiences which memory can recall. When I 
was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought 
as a child ; but I who utter these words am the same being that I 
was a score or threescore years ago. I look forward to the future, 
and know that to mCy and not to another, the consequences of my 
actions are directly chargeable. In the endless succession of 
thoughts, feelings, choices, in all the mutations of opinion and of 
character, the identity of the ego abides. From the dawn of con- 
sciousness, as soon as recollection is awake, to my last breath, I do 
not part with myself. The abnormal experience, in certain cases, 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 3 

of double consciousness no more disproves this truth than occa- 
sional instances of hallucination belie the fact of sense-perception. 
" If we speak of the mind as a series of feelings which is aware of 
itself as past and future, we are reduced to the alternative of believ- 
ing that the mind, or ego^ is something different from any series of 
feelings, or of accepting the paradox that something which is ex 
hypothesi but a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a series." 
So writes John Stuart Mill. Yet, on the basis of this astounding 
assumption that a series can be self-conscious, Mill was minded to 
frame his philosophy, and was only deterred by the confessed 
insurmountable difficulty of supposing memory with no being 
capable of remembering. 

The second constituent element of personality is self-determi- 
nation. This act is likewise essential to distinct self-conscious- 
ness. Were there no exercise of will, were the mind wholly 
passive under all impressions from without, the clear conscious- 
ness of self would never be evoked. In truth, self in that case 
would have only an inchoate being.^ " It is in the will, in purpo- 
sive action, and particularly in our moral activity, as Fichte, to 
my mind, conclusively demonstrated, that we lay hold upon real- 
ity. All that we know might be but a dream-procession of 
shadows, and the mind of the dreamer no more than the still mir- 
ror in which they are reflected, if, indeed, it were anything but 
the shifting shadows themselves. But in the purposive ' I will,' 
each man is real, and is immediately conscious of his own reality. 
Whatever else may or may not be real, this is real. This is the 
fundamental belief, around which scepticism may weave its maze 
of doubts and logical puzzles, but from which it is eventually 
powerless to dislodge us, because no argument can affect an im- 
mediate certainty, — a certainty, moreover, on which our whole 
view of the universe depends." ^ That I originate my voluntary 
actions in the sense that they are not the effect or unavoidable 
consequence of antecedents, whether in the mind or out of it, is a 
fact of consciousness. This is what is meant by the freedom of 
the will. It is a definition of " choice." Thoughts spring up in 

^ The view of self-consciousness in the foregoing remarks is quite contrary 
to the view, if taken in the proper sense of the terms, that " individuals may 
be included in other individuals " and that there is " a genuine identity of 
Being in various individuals." 

2 A, Seth, Two Lectures on Theisfn, p. 46. 



4 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the mind, and succeed one another under laws of association 
whose absolute control is limited only by the power we have of 
concentrating attention on one object or another within the hori- 
zon of consciousness. Desires reaching out to various forms of 
good spring up unbidden. They, too, are subject to regulation 
through no power inherent in themselves. But self-determina- 
tion, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible 
conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted. We 
leave out of account here the nature of habit, or the tendency of 
choice once made or often repeated to perpetuate itself. That a 
moral bondage may ensue from an abuse of liberty is conceded. 
The mode and degree in which habit affects freedom is an im- 
portant topic ; but it is one which we do not need to consider in 
this place. ^ That the will is free — that is, both exempt from 
constraint by causes exterior, which is fatalism, and not a mere 
spontaneity, shut up to one path by a force acting from within, 
which is determinism — is immediately evident to every unsophis- 
ticated mind. We can initiate action by the exercise of an 
agency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor 
determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a prone- 
ness inherent in its nature. No truth is more definitely or abun- 
dantly sanctioned by the common sense of mankind. Those who 
in theory reject it, continually assert it in practice. The lan- 
guages of men would have to be reconstructed, the business of the 
world would come to a standstill, if the denial of the freedom of 
the will were to be carried out with rigorous consistency. This 
freedom is not only attested in consciousness ; it is evinced by 
that abiHty to resist inducements brought to bear on the mind 
which we are conscious of exerting. We can withstand tempta- 
tion to wrong by the exertion of an energy which consciously 
emanates from ourselves, and which we know that, the circum- 
stances remaining the same, we could abstain from exerting. If 
motives have an influence, that influence is not tantamount to 
deterministic efficiency. Praise and blame, and the punishments 
and rewards, of whatever kind, which imply these judgments, are 

1 Plainly, circumstances, including prior courses of conduct, may render 
a particular direction of choice more, or less, difficult. " There is a growth 
in moral freedom" (Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, p. 138). But the difficulty 
thus arising is not of a kind or degree to destroy the capacity of freely deter- 
mining the action of the will. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 5 

plainly irrational, save on the tacit assumption of the autonomy of 
self. Deny free-will, and remorse, as well as self-approbation, is 
deprived of an essential ingredient. It is then impossible to dis- 
tinguish remorse from regret. Ill-desert becomes a fiction. This 
is not to argue against the necessitarian doctrine, merely on the 
ground of its bad tendencies. It is true that the debasement of 
the individual, and the wreck of social order, would follow upon 
the unflinching adoption of the necessitarian theory in the judg- 
ments and conduct of men. Virtue would no more be thought to 
deserve love ; crime would no longer be felt to deserve hatred. 
But independently of this aspect of the subject, there is, to say 
the very least, a strong presumption against the truth of a theorem 
in philosophy that clashes with the common sense and moral sen- 
timents of the race. The awe-inspiring sense of individual respon- 
sibility, the sting of remorse, the shame of detected sin, emotions 
of moral reprobation and moral approval, ought not to be treated 
as illusive, unless they can be demonstrated to be so. Here are 
phenomena which no metaphysical scheme can afford to ignore. 
Surely no theory can ever look for general acceptance which is 
obliged to eviscerate or explain away these familiar facts and leave 
an irreconcilable conflict in human nature. 

How shall the feeling that we are free be accounted for if it be 
contrary to the fact ? Let us glance at what famous necessita- 
rians have to say in answer to this inquiry. First, let us hear one 
of the foremost representatives of this school. His solution is 
one that has often been repeated. " Men believe themselves to 
be free," says Spinoza, " entirely from this, that, though con- 
scious of their acts, they are ignorant of the causes by which their 
acts are determined. The idea of freedom, therefore, comes of 
men not knowing the cause of their acts." ^ This is a bare asser- 
tion, confidently made, but void of proof. It surely is not a self- 
evident truth that our belief in freedom arises in this manner. 
Further, when we make the motives preceding any particular act 
of choice the object of deliberate scrutiny, the sense of freedom is 
not in the least weakened. The motives are distinctly seen, yet 
the consciousness of liberty, or of a pluripotential power, remains in 
full vigor. Moreover, choice is not the resultant of motives, as in 
a case of the composition of forces. One motive is followed, and 
its rival rejected. Hume has another explanation of what he con- 

1 Ethics, P. ii. prop. xxxv. 



6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

siders the delusive feeling of freedom. " Our idea," he says, " of 
necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity observ- 
able in the operations of nature, where similar objects are con- 
stantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom 
to infer the one from the appearance of the other." ^ This con- 
stant conjunction of things is all that we know; but men have "a 
strong propensity " to believe in " something like a necessary con- 
nection " between the antecedent and the consequent. " When, 
again, they turn their reflections towards the operations of their 
own minds, and fee/ no such connection of the motive and the 
action, they are thence apt to suppose that there is a difference 
between the effects which result from material force, and those 
which arise from thought and intelligence." ^ In other words, a 
double delusion is asserted. First, the mind, for some unex- 
plained reason, falsely imagines a tie between the material antece- 
dent and consequent, and then, missing such a bond between 
motive and choice, it rashly infers freedom. So far from this 
being a true representation, it is the mind's conscious exertion of 
energy that enables it even to conceive of a causal relation 
between things external. Hume's solution depends on the theory 
that nothing properly called power exists. It is assumed that 
there is no power, either in motives or in the will. Hume's neces- 
sity, unlike that of Spinoza, is mere uniformity of succession, 
choice following motive with regularity, but with no nexus between 
the two. 

J. S. Mill, adopting an identical theory of causation, from 
which power is eliminated, lands in the same general conclu- 
sion, on this question of free-will, as that reached by Hume. 
Herbert Spencer holds that the fact " that every one is at liberty 
to do what he desires to do (supposing there are no external 
hindrances) " is the sum of our liberty. He states that " the 
dogma of free-will" is the proposition "that every one is at liberty 
to desire or not to desire." That is, he confounds choice and 
volition with desire, denies the existence of an elective power 
distinct from the desires, and imputes a definition of free-will to 
the advocates of freedom which they unanimously repudiate. As 
to the feeling of freedom, Mr. Spencer says, "The illusion con- 

^ An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, P. i. § 8 (^Essays, ed. 
Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 67). 
2/<5zV., p. 75. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 7 

sists in supposing that at each moment the ego ... is something 
more than the aggregate of feehngs and ideas, actual and nascent, 
which then exists." ^ When a man says that he determined to 
perform a certain action, his error is in supposing his conscious 
self to have been " something separate from the group of psy- 
chical states " constituting his " psychical self." " Will is nothing 
but the general name given to the special feeling or feelings which 
for a moment prevail over others." ^ The "composite psychical 
state which excites the action is at the same time the ego which 
is said to will the action." The soul is resolved into a group of 
psychical states due to " motor changes " excited by an impres- 
sion received from without. If there is no personal agent, if / is 
a collective noun, meaning a " group " of sensations, it is a waste 
of time to argue that there is no freedom. " What we call a 
mind," wrote Hume long ago, " is nothing but a heap or collec- 
tion of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, 
and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect sim- 
plicity and identity." Professor Huxley, who quotes this passage, 
would make no other correction than to substitute an assertion of 
nescience for the positive denial. He would rather say, " that we 
know nothing more of the mind than that it is a series of percep- 
tions." 3 

Before commenting on this definition of the mind, which robs it 
of its unity, it is worth while to notice what account the advocates 
of necessity have to give of the feelings of praise and blame, ten- 
ants of the soul which appear to claim a right to be there, and 
which it is very hard even for speculative philosophers to dislodge. 
On this topic Spinoza is remarkably chary of explanation. " I 
designate as gratitude ^^ he says, " the feeling we experience 
from the acting of another, done, as we imagine, to gratify us ; 
and aversion, the uneasy sense we experience when we imagine 

^ Prhiciples of Psychology, vol. i. p. 500. 

'^ Ibid., p. 503. It is sometimes said that " Hamlet is left out of the play," 
but this is seldom done, as in this instance, by an explicit avowal. It recalls 
the lines of Goethe : — 

" Wer will was Lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben, 
Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben, 
Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand, 
Fehlt, leider ! nur das geistige Band." 
* Huxley's Hume, with Helps to the Study of Berkeley, p. 75 ; also Collected 
Essays, vol. vi. 



8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

anything done with a view to our disadvantage; and, whilst we 
praise the former, we are disposed to blame the latter." ^ What 
does Spinoza mean by the phrase " with a view to our advantage " 
or "disadvantage"? As the acts done, in either case, were 
unavoidable on the part of the doer, — as much so as the circula- 
tion of blood in his veins, — it is impossible to see any reasonable- 
ness in praise or blame, thankfulness or resentment. Why should 
we resent the stab of an assassin more than the kick of a horse ? 
Why should we be any more grateful to a benefactor than we are 
to the sun for shining on us ? If the sun were conscious of shin- 
ing on us, and of shining on us "with a view" to warm us, in 
Spinoza's meaning of the phrase, but with not the least power to 
do otherwise, how would that consciousness found a claim to our 
gratitude ? What we are looking for is a ground of approbation 
or condemnation. When Spinoza proceeds to define " just " and 
"unjust," "sin" and "merit," he broaches a theory not dissimilar 
to that of Hobbes, that there is no natural law but the desires, that 
" in the state of nature there is nothing done that can properly be 
characterized as just or unjust," that in " the natural state," prior 
to the organization of society, " faults, offences, crimes, cannot be 
conceived." ^ As for repentance, Spinoza does not hesitate to 
lay down the thesis that " repentance is not a virtue, or does not 
arise from reason ; but he who repents of any deed he has done is 
twice miserable or impotent." ^ Penitence is defined as " sorrow 
accompanying the idea of sornething we believe we have done of 
free-will." * It mainly depends,' he tells us, on education. Since 
free-will is an illusive notion, penitence must be inferred to be in the 
same degree irrational. To these opinions, not less superficial than 
they are immoral, the ablest advocates of necessity are driven when 
they stand face to face with the phenomena of conscience. 

Mill, in seeking to vindicate the consistency of punishment with 
his doctrine of determinism, maintains that it is right to punish ; 
first, as penalty tends to restrain and cure an evil-doer, and sec- 
ondly, as it tends to secure society from aggression. " It is just 
to punish," he says, " so far as it is necessary for this purpose," 
for the security of society, " exactly as it is just to put a wild beast 
to death (without unnecessary suffering) for the same object."^ 

1 Ethics, P. iii. prop. xxix. schol. ^ jbid,^ p. iv. prop, xxxvii. schol. 2. 

^ Ibid., P. iv. prop. liv. ^ Ibid., P. iii. def. 27. ^Examination of Sir 
W. Hamilton's Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 292. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 9 

It will hardly be asserted by any one that a brute deserves punish- 
ment, in the proper and accepted meaning of the term. Surely 
to behead a inan requires a defence different in kind from that 
required to crush a mosquito. Later, Mill attempts to find a basis 
for a true responsibility ; but in doing so he virtually, though un- 
wittingly, surrenders his necessitarian theory. " The true doctrine 
of the causation of human actions maintains," he says, " that not 
only our conduct, but our character, is in part amenable to our 
will ; that we can, by employing the proper means, improve our 
character ; and that if our character is such, that, while it remains 
what it is, it necessitates us to do wrong, it will be just to apply 
motives which will necessitate us to strive for its improvement, 
and to emancipate ourselves from the other necessity." ^ Here, 
while verbally holding to his theory of the deterministic agency 
of motives, he introduces the phrases which I have put in italics, 
— phrases which carry in them the idea of free personal endeavor, 
and exclude that of determinism. " The true doctrine of neces- 
sity," says Mill, "while maintaining that our character is formed 
by our circumstances, asserts at the same time that our desires 
can do much to alter our circumstances." But how about our 
control over our desires? Have we any more control, direct or 
indirect, over them than over our circumstances ? If not, " the 
true doctrine of necessity " no more founds responsibility than 
does the naked fatalism which Mill disavows. It is not uncom- 
mon for necessitarian writers, unconsciously it may be, to draw a 
veil over their theory by affirming that actions are the necessary 
fruit of a character already formed ; thus leaving room for the 
supposition, that, in the forming of that character, the will exerted 
at some time an independent agency. But such an agency, it 
need not be said, at whatever point it is placed, is incompatible 
with their main doctrine. 

The standing argument for necessity, drawn out by Hobbes, 
Collins, et id o?n?ie genus, is based on the law of cause and effect. 
It is alleged, that if motives are not efficient in determining the 
will, then an event — namely, the particular direction of the will 
in a case of choice, or the choice of one object rather than an- 
other — is without a cause. This has been supposed to be an 
invincible argument. In truth, however, the event in question is 
not without a cause in the sense that would be true of an event 

^ Ibid., vol. ii. p. 299. 



10 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

wholly disconnected from an efficient antecedent, — of a world, 
for example, springing into being without a Creator. The mind 
is endued with the power to act in either of two directions, the 
proper circumstances being present ; and, whichever way it may 
actually move, its motion is its own, the result of its own power. 
That the mind is not subject to the law of causation which holds 
good elsewhere than in the sphere of intelligent, voluntary action, 
is the very thing asserted. Self-activity, initial motion, is the dis- 
tinctive attribute of spiritual agents. The prime error of the 
necessitarian is in unwarrantably assuming that the mind in its 
voluntary action is subject to the same law which prevails in the 
realm of things material and unintelligent. This opinion is not 
only false, but shallow. For where do we first get our notion of 
power or causal energy? Where but from the exercise of our 
own wills ? If we exerted no voluntary agency, we should have 
no idea of causal efficiency. Being outside of the circle of our 
experience, causation would be utterly unknown. Necessitarians, 
in the ranks of whom are found at the present day not a few 
students of physical science, frequently restrict their observa- 
tion to things without themselves, and, having formulated a law of 
causation for the objects with which they are chiefly conversant, 
they forthwith extend it over the mind, — an entity, despite its 
close connection with matter, toto genere different. They should re- 
member that the very terms "force," " power," " energy," "cause," 
are only intelligible from the experience we have of the exercise 
of will. They are applied in some modified sense to things ex- 
ternal. But we are immediately cognizant of no cause but will, 
and the nature of that cause must be learned from consciousness ; 
it can never be learned from an inspection of things heterogene- 
ous to the mind, and incapable by themselves of imparting to it 
the faintest notion of power. 

It is sometimes said that the doctrine of the liberty of the will is 
self-destructive. The will, it is said, is reduced to a blind power, 
dissevered from inteUigence and freedom. But " freedom of the 
will " is a phrase which means " freedom of self," freedom of the 
mind, an indivisible unit — which includes intelligence and sen- 
sibility, yet is enslaved to neither. 

But it is complained that if the operations of the will are not 
governed by law, psychologic science is impossible. " Psychical 
changes," says Herbert Spencer, " either conform to law, or they 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN II 

do not. If they do not conform to law, this work, in common 
with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense ; no science of 
psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot 
be any such thing as free-will." ^ Were uniformity found, as a 
matter of fact, to characterize the self-determinations of the mind, 
even then necessity would not be proved. Suppose the mind 
always to determine itself in strict conformity with reason ; this 
would not prove constraint, or disprove freedom. If it were 
shown, that, as a matter of fact, the mind always chooses in the 
same way, the antecedents being precisely the same, neither fatal- 
ism nor determinism would be thereby demonstrated. If it be 
meant, by the conformity of the will to law, that no man has the 
power to choose otherwise than he actually chooses ; that, to take 
an example from moral conduct, no thief, or seducer, or assassin, 
was capable of any such previous exercise of will as would have 
caused him to abstain from the crimes which he has perpe- 
trated, — then every reasonable, not to say righteous, person will 
deny the proposition. The alternative that a work on psychology, 
so far as it rests on a theory of fatalism, is " sheer nonsense," it 
is far better to endure than to fly in the face of common sense 
and of the conscience of the race. But psychology has left to it 
a wide enough field without the need of denying room for moral 
liberty. A book of ethics which is constructed on the assumption 
that the free and responsible nature of man is an illusive notion 
is worth no more than the postulate on which it is founded.^ 

Besides the argument against freedom from the alleged incon- 
sistency with the law of causation which it involves, there is a sec- 
ond objection which is frequently urged. We are reminded that 

'^Psychology, vol. i. p. 621. This passage is not in the 4th ed. See vol. ii. p. 
503. The doctrine remains the same. " That the ego is the passing group of 
feelings and ideas, ... is true if we include the body and its functions," p. 
503. The action is determined by a " certain composite mass of emotion 
and thought," p. 501. 

2 Of course, Spencer is not alone in these pleas for determinism. For ex- 
ample, Wundt, who holds to the absolute sway of causality, " psychical 
causality," in the specification of choice, complains that without it there can 
be " no psychology, no science of mind " ( The Principles of Morality, etc., 
P' 53)' Wundt, like Mill, is anxious to remind his readers that " motives are 
effects as well as causes," and that one's " whole previous history " lies back of 
any particular choice (pp. 10, 38). But, as with Mill, in these prior choices, 
of which character is the result, no real freedom of self is presupposed. 



12 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

there is an order of history. Events, we are told, within the sphere 
of voluntary agency succeed each other with regularity of sequence. 
We can predict what individuals will do with a considerable degree 
of confidence, — with as much confidence as could be expected 
considering the complexity of the phenomena. There is a prog- 
ress of a community and of mankind which evinces a reign of law 
within the compass of personal action. The conduct of one gen- 
eration is shaped by the conduct of that which precedes it. 

That there is a plan in the course of human affairs, all believers 
in Providence hold. History does not present a chaotic series of 
occurrences, but a system, a progressive order, to be more or less 
clearly discerned. The inference, however, that the wills of men 
are destitute of self-activity, is rashly drawn. If it were thought 
that we are confronted with two apparently antagonistic truths, 
whose point of reconciliation is beyond our ken, the situation 
would have its parallels in other branches of human inquiry. We 
should be justified in holding to each truth on its own grounds, 
each being sufficiently verified, and in waiting for the solution of 
the problem. But the whole objection can be shown to rest, in 
great part, on misunderstanding of the doctrine of free-will. Free- 
dom does not involve, of necessity, a haphazard departure from 
regularity in the actual choices of men under the same circum- 
stances. As already remarked, that men do act in one way, in 
the presence of given circumstances, does not prove that they 
must so act. Again, those who propound this objection fail to 
discern the real points along the path of developing character 
where freedom is exercised. They often fail to perceive that 
there are habits of will which take their rise in self-determination, 
— habits for which men are responsible so far as they are morally 
right or wrong, and which exist within them as abiding purposes 
or voluntary principles of conduct. Of a man who loves money bet- 
ter than anything else, it may be predicted that he will seize upon 
any occasion that offers itself to make an advantageous bargain. 
But this love of money is a voluntary principle which he can curb, 
and, influenced by moral considerations, supersede by a higher 
motive of conduct. The fact of habit, voluntary habit, springing 
ultimately from choice, practically circumscribes the variableness 
of action, and contributes powerfully to the production of a cer- 
tain degree of uniformity of conduct, on which prediction as to 
what individuals will do is founded. But all predictions in regard 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 13 

to the future conduct of men, or societies of men, are liable to 
fail, not merely because of the varied and complicated data in the 
case of human action, but because new influences, not in the least 
coercive, may still set at defiance all statistical vaticinations. A 
religious reform, like that of John Wesley, gives rise to an essen- 
tial alteration of the conduct of multitudes, changes the face of 
society in extensive districts, and upsets, for example, previous cal- 
culations as to the percentage of crime to be expected in the re- 
gions affected. The seat of moral freedom is deep in the radical 
self-determinations by which the chief ends of conduct, the mo- 
tives of life in the aggregate, are fixed. Kant had a profound per- 
ception of this truth, although he erred in limiting absolutely the 
operations of free-will to the " noumenal " sphere, and in relegat- 
ing all moral conduct, except the primal choice, to the realm of 
phenomenal and therefore necessary action. A theist finds no 
difficulty in ascribing moral evil wholly to the will of the creature, 
and in accounting for the orderly succession of events, or the plan 
of history, by the overruling agency of God, which has no need to 
interfere with human liberty, or to constrain or to crush the free 
and responsible nature of man, but knows how to pilot the race 
onward, be the rocks and cross-currents where and what they may 
be. 

Self-consciousness and self-determination, each involving the 
other, are the essential peculiarities of mind. With self-determi- 
nation is inseparably connected purpose. The intelligent action 
of the will is for an end ; and this preconceived end — which is 
last in the order of time, although first in thought — is termed the 
final cause. It is the goal to which the volitions dictated by it 
point and lead. So simple an act of will as the volition to lift a 
finger is for a purpose. The thought of the result to be effected 
precedes that efficient act of the will by which, in some inscrut- 
able way, the requisite muscular motion is produced. I purpose 
to send a letter to a friend. There is a plan present in thought 
before it is resolved upon, or converted into an intention, and 
prior to the several exertions of voluntary power by which it is 
accomplished. Guided by this plan, I enter my library, open a 
drawer, find the proper writing-materials, compose the letter, seal 
it, and despatch it. Here is a series of voluntary actions done in 
pursuance of a plan which antedated them in consciousness, and 
through them is realized. The movements of brain and muscle 



14 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

which take place in the course of the proceeding are subservient 
to the conscious plan by which all the power employed in reahz- 
ing it is directed. This is rational voluntary action ; it is action 
for an end. In this way the whole business of human life is car- 
ried forward. All that is termed "art," in the broadest meaning 
of the word, — that is, all that is not included either in the prod- 
ucts of material nature, which the wit and power of men can 
neither produce nor modify, or in the strictly involuntary states 
of mind with their physical effects, — comes into being in the way 
described. The conduct of men in their individual capacity, the 
organization of families and states, the government of nations, the 
management of armies, the diversified pursuits of industry, what- 
ever is because men have willed it to be, is due to self-determina- 
tion involving design. 

The opinion has not wholly lacked supporters that man is an 
automaton. All that he does they have ascribed to a chain of 
causes wholly embraced within a circle of nervous and muscular 
movements. Some, finding it impossible to ignore consciousness, 
have contented themselves with denying to non-material states 
causal agency. On this view it follows that the plan to take a 
journey, to build a house, or to do anything else which presup- 
poses design, has no influence whatever upon the result. The 
same efforts would be produced if we were utterly unconscious of 
any intention to bring them to pass. The design, not being cred- 
ited with the least influence or control over the instruments through 
which the particular end is reached, might be subtracted without 
affecting the result. Since consciousness neither originates nor 
transmits motion, and thus exerts no power, the effects of what we 
call voluntary agency would take place as well without it. This 
creed, when it is once clearly defined, is not Hkely to win many 
adherents.^ 

The scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy is entirely 
consistent with the freedom of the will and with the reciprocal 
influence of mind and body. Whether the general notion of 
energy as inhering in material bodies and transmissible is any- 
thing but a scientific metaphor, it is needless here to discuss. 
The doctrine is, that as the sum of matter remains the same, so is 

1 For a clear exposition of the consequences of denying the agency of mind, 
see Herbert, The Realistic Assumptions of Modern Science, etc., pp. 103 seq.^ 
128 seq. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 1 5 

it with the sum of energy, potential or in action, in any body or 
system of bodies. Energy may be transmitted ; that is, lost in one 
body, it reappears undiminished in another, or, ceasing in one 
form, it is exerted in another, and this according to definite ratios. 
In other words, there is a correlation of the physical forces. 
While this is believed to be true, there is not the slightest evi- 
dence that mental action is caused by the transmitting of energy 
from the physical system. Nor is there any proof that the mind 
transfers additional energy to matter. Nor, again, is there the 
slightest evidence that mental action is correlated with physical. 
That mental action is affected by physical change is evident. 
That the mind acts upon the brain, modifying its state, exerting a 
directive power upon the nerve-centres, is equally certain. The 
doctrine of conservation, as its best expounders — Clerk Maxwell, 
for example — have perceived, does not militate in the least 
against the limited control of the human will and the supreme 
control of the divine. 

Attending the inward assurance of freedom is the consciousness 
of moral law. While I know that I can do or forbear, I feel that I 
otcght or ought not. The desires of human nature are various. 
They go forth to external good, which reaches the mind through 
the channel of the senses. They go out also to objects less tangi- 
ble, as power, fame, knowledge, the esteem of others. But dis- 
tinct from these diverse, and, it may be, conflicting desires, a law 
manifests itself in consciousness, and lays its authoritative mandate 
on the will. The requirement of that law in the concrete may be 
differently conceived. It may be grossly misapprehended. But 
the feeling of obligation is an ineradicable element of our being. 
It is universal, or as nearly so as the perception of beauty or any 
other essential attribute of the soul. For an ethical theory to dis- 
pense with it is suicide. It implies an ideal or end which the will 
is bound freely to realize. Be this end clearly or dimly discerned, 
and though it be in a great degree misconceived, its existence is 
implied in the imperative character of the law within. The con- 
fusion that may arise in respect to the contents of the law and the 
end to which the law points does not disprove the reality of either. 
An unenlightened and perverted conscience is still a conscience. 

Shall the source and ground of nature and self-consciousness 
alike be placed in the object, the world without? This cannot be. 



1 6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

*' Nature cannot give that which she does not herself possess. She 
cannot give birth to that which is to to genere dissimilar." Nature 
can take no such leap. A new beginning on a plane above Nature 
it is beyond the power of Nature to originate. Self- consciousness 
can only be referred to self-consciousness as its author and source. 
It can have its ground in nothing that is itself void of consciousness. 
Only a personal Power above Nature can account for self-conscious- 
ness in man. It presupposes an original and unconditioned, 
because original, self-consciousness. The spark of a divine fire 
is deposited in Nature ; it is in Nature, but not of it. 

Thus the consciousness of God enters inseparably into the con- 
sciousness of self as its hidden background.^ " The descent into 
our inmost being is at the same time an ascent to God." All pro- 
found reflection in which the soul withdraws from the world to 
contemplate its own being brings us to God, in whom we live and 
move. We are conscious of God in a more intimate sense than we 
are conscious of finite things. As they themselves are derived, so 
is our knowledge of them. 

In order to know a limit as a limit, as it is often said, we must 
already be in some sense beyond it. "We should not be able," 
says JuHus Miiller, " in the remotest degree to surmise that our 
personality — that in us whereby we are exalted, not in degree 
only, but in kind, above every other existence — is limited, were not 
the consciousness of the Absolute Personality originally stamped, 
however obscure and however effaced the outhnes may often be, 
upon our souls." It is in the knowledge of the Infinite One that 
we know ourselves as finite.^ 

Moreover, to self-determination, the second element of person- 

1 Shall the conviction of the being of God that springs up in the soul in 
connection with feeling of dependence be regarded as the product of infer- 
ence? It is nearer the truth to say that the recognition of God, more or less 
obscure, is something involved and even presupposed in this feeling. How 
can there be a sense of self as dependent, unless there be an underlying sense 
of a somewhat, however vaguely apprehended, on which we depend? The 
one feeling is an implicate of the other. 

The error of many who have too closely followed Schleiermacher is in 
representing the feeling of dependence as void of an intellectual element. 
Ulrici and some other German writers avoid this mistake by using the term 
" Gefuhls-perception " to designate that state of mind in which feeling is the 
predominant element, and perception is still rudimental and obscure. 

2 See J. Miiller, Lehre v. d. Sunde, vol. i. pp. loi seq. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 17 

ality, like self-consciousness, a limit is consciously prescribed. 
The limit is the moral law to which the will is bound, though not 
necessitated, to conform. We find this law within us, a rule for 
the regulation of the will. It is not merely independent of the 
will — this is true of the emotions generally — it speaks with 
authority. It is a voice of command and of prohibition. This 
rule man spontaneously identifies with the will of Him who reveals 
himself in consciousness as the Author of his being. The uncon- 
ditional nature of the demand which we are conscious that the 
moral law makes upon us, against all rebellious desires and pas- 
sions, in the face of our own antagonistic will, can only be ex- 
plained by identifying it thus with a higher Will from which it 
emanates. In self-consciousness God reveals his being ; in con- 
science he reveals his authority and his will concerning man. 
Through this recognition of the law of conscience as the will of 
God in whom we live, morality and rehgion coalesce. 

Sir William Hamilton, in pointing out the basis of theism,^ sets 
in contrast the natural world in which the phenomena " are pro- 
duced and reproduced in the same invariable succession," " in the 
chain of physical necessity," with the phenomena of man in whom 
intelligence is a " free power," being subject only to the law of 
duty, which he can carry into effect. This proves that in the 
order of existence, as we experience it in ourselves, intelligence is 
supreme, and as far as its Hberty extends " is independent of 
necessity and matter." By analogy, Hamilton argues, we are 
authorized to carry into the order of the universe the relation 
which we find in the human constitution. The argument is sound, 
for it is on the path of Analogy that science has made its advance. 
It is not reflection, however, and reasoning, but that immediate 
self-revelation of God in the human mind which, as explained 
above, is at the root of theistic faith. 

It is obvious that the dictates of conscience, so far as its action 
is sound and normal, express the moral preferences, that is to say, 
the character, of God. His holiness is evidenced in the condem- 
nation uttered within us of purposes and practices at variance with 
righteousness. The love of God is expressed in the mandate of 
conscience to exercise just and kindly feelings, to act conformably 
to them and to cherish a comprehensive good will. Whenever 
conscience is so awakened and enlightened as to discern that an 

'^ Metaphysics f pp. 21 seq. 
C 



1 8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

unselfish spirit is the law of life, the revelation in the soul is 
complete that God is Love. 

Not through the channel of inteUigence and of conscience alone, 
but also through that of sensibility and affection, is God manifest 
to the soul. Religion is communion with God. If we look atten- 
tively at religion in its pure and elevated form, as, for example, it 
finds expression in Psalms of the Old Testament, we shall best per- 
ceive its constituent elements, and the sources within us from 
which it springs. We shall find that along with the sense of obh- 
gation and of dependence in which the existence of a Supreme 
Being is recognized, there is intimately connected a native pro- 
clivity to rest upon, and hold converse with. Him in whom we 
live. The tendency to commune with Him is an essential part of 
the religious constitution of man. To pray to Him for help, to 
lean on Him for support, to worship Him, are native and sponta- 
neous movements of the human spirit. Man feels himself drawn 
to the Being who reveals Himself to him in the primitive operations 
of inteUigence and conscience, and inspires him with the sense of 
dependence. As man was made for God, there is a nisus in the 
direction of this union to his Creator. This tendency, which may 
take the form of an intense craving, may be compared to the 
social instinct with which it is akin. As man was made not to be 
alone, but to commune with other beings like himself, solitude 
would be an unnatural and almost unbearable state ; and a longing 
for converse with other men is a part of his nature. In like man- 
ner, as man was made to commune with God, he is drawn to God 
by an inward tendency, the strength of which is derived from the 
vacuum left in the soul, and the unsatisfied yearning, consequent 
on an exclusion of God as the supreme object of love and trust. 
These feelings are not to be discounted from the testimony in the 
soul to his being. 

John Fiske in his little book Through Nature to God^ speaks 
of the nascent Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward 
something akin to itself not in the realm of fleeting phenomena 
but in the Eternal Presence beyond. He adds : " If the re- 

1 Cf. Ulrici, Gott u. die Natur, pp. 606 seq. " The general conviction of a 
divine existence we regard as less an inference than a perception." — Bowne, 
Studies in Theism, p. 79. 

2 pp. 188, 189. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 19 

lation thus established in the morning twilight of Man's existence 
between the Human Soul and a world invisible and immaterial 
is a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the 
objective term is non-existent, then I say it is something utterly 
without precedent in the whole history of creation." It contra- 
dicts "all the analogies of evolution," so far as we understand 
it. To whatever just criticism some expressions of this author con- 
nected with the foregoing observations may be open, these state- 
ments on the " Everlasting Reality of Religion " are sound and 
impressive. "Our heart is restless," writes Augustine, "unless it 
repose in Thee." 

In sense-perception external objects are brought directly to our 
knowledge. Through sensations compared and combined by 
reason, we perceive outward things in their being and relations. 
There are perceptions of the spirit as well as of sense. The being 
whom we call God may, so to speak, come in contact with the 
soul. As the soul, in the experience of sensations, posits the 
outer world, so, in analogous inward experiences, it posits God. 
The feelings, yearnings, aspirations, which are at the root of the 
spiritual perception, are not continuous, as in the perceptions of 
matter ; they vary in liveliness ; they are contingent, in a remark- 
able degree, on character. Hence religious faith may not have 
the clearness, the uniform and abiding character, which belongs 
to our recognition of outward things.^ 

The understanding is not the sole authority in the sphere of 
moral and religious behef. Rationalism has been defined as "a 
usurpation of the understanding." There are moral exactions and 
dictates which have a voice not to be disregarded. So, likewise, 
are there instinctive, almost irrepressible, instincts of feeling to be 
taken into account. It is the satisfaction of the spirit, and not 
any single organ or function of the soul, which is felt to be the 
criterion of full-orbed truth. " If a certain formula for expressing 
the nature of the world violates my moral demand, I shall be as 
free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disap- 
pointed my demand for uniformity of sequence." ^ " Just as within 

1 On the subject of the immediate manifestation of God to the soul, and 
the analogy of sense-perception, the reader may be referred to Lotze, Gruiid- 
ziige d. Religionsphil., p. 3; Mikrokostnos, vol. iii. chap, iv.; Ulrici, Gott u. die 
NatuTy pp. 605-624; Gott u. der Mensch, vol. i.; Bowne, Studies in Theism, 
chap. ii. 2 Professor William James, The Will to Believe, etc., p. 147. 



20 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the limits of theism some kinds are surviving others by reason of 
their greater practical rationality, so theism itself, by reason of its 
practical rationality, is certain to survive all lower creeds."^ 
"There is a moral as well as a logical rationality to be satisfied," 
is a pithy sentence of the same author, who adds respecting the 
inquiries and suggestions of natural science that even " Physics 
is always seeking to satisfy our own subjective passions." 

Belief in a future life, in immortality, is closely connected with 
belief in God. The soul that communes with him finds in this 
very relation — in the sense of its own worth implied in this rela- 
tion — the assurance that it is not to perish with its material 
organs. It is conscious of belonging to a different order of things. 
In proportion as the moral and religious nature is roused to activ- 
ity, this consciousness gains in life and vigor. " ' But how do you 
wish us to bury you? ' said Crito to Socrates. *Just as you please,' 
he answered, 'if you only get hold of me and do not let me escape 
you.' And quietly laughing and glancing at us, he said, ' I cannot 
persuade Crito, my friends, that this Socrates, who is now talking 
with you, and laying down each one of these propositions, is my 
very self; for his mind is full of the thought that /am he whom 
he is to see in a little while as a corpse ; and so he asks how he 
shall bury me.' " ^ 

The consciousness of a free and responsible nature, of a law 
suggestive of a personal Lawgiver, of the need of communion with 
the Father of the spirit, of the sense of orphanage without God, 
are not all that is required for the realization of rehgion in the 
soul. There must be an acknowledgment of God which carries in 
it an active concurrence of the will. The will utters its " yea " 
and " amen " to the attractive power of God experienced within 
the soul. It gives consent to the reality of that dependence and 
obligation to obedience, in which the finite soul stands to God. 
" The holding fast to the personal God and to the inviolability of 
conscience, is an act of the soul, conditioned on a living sense of 
the supreme worth of this conviction." Faith springs from no 
coercion of logic. When a man is sorely tempted by plausible 
reasoning, but chooses to abide by the right, come what will, it is 

1 Professor William James, The Will to Believe, etc., p. 126. 

2 Plato, Phcedo, 115. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 21 

a kind of venture. The inward satisfaction, with the decision once 
made, requires no other testimonial. We beheve in God, not on 
the ground of a scientific demonstration, but because it is our 
duty to beheve in him. Faith in its general sense is defined by 
Coleridge as " fidelity to our own being — so far as such being is 
not and cannot become an object of the senses," together with its 
concomitants, the first of which is the acknowledgment of God.^ 

The refusal thus practically to acknowledge God by a ratifying 
act of the will, the assent of the entire man, is to enthrone the 
false principle of self-assertion or self-sufficiency in the soul, — 
false because it is contrary to the reality of things. It is a kind 
of self-deification. Man may refuse " to retain God in his knowl- 
edge." The result is, that the feehngs out of which religion 
springs, and in which it is rationally founded, are not extirpated, 
but are driven to fasten on finite objects in the world, or on ficti- 
tious creations of the imagination. Idolatry is the enthronement 
of that which belongs to the creature, in the place of the Creator. 
There is an idolatry of which the world, in the form of power, 
fame, riches, pleasure, or knowledge, is the object. When the 
proper food is wanting, the attempt is made to appease the appe- 
tite with drugs and stimulants. 

Theology has deemed itself warranted by sound philosophy, as 
well as by the teaching of Scripture, in maintaining, that, but for the 
intrusion of moral evil or the practical substitution of a finite object, 
real or imaginary, for God as the supreme good, the knowledge of 
him would shine more and more brightly in the soul, from 
the dawn of intelligence, keeping pace with its advancing de- 
velopment. The more one turns the eye within, and fastens his 
attention on the characteristic elements of his own spirit, the more 
clear and firm is found to be his belief in God. And the more 
completely the will follows the law that is written on the heart, the 
more vivid is the conviction of the reality of the Lawgiver, whose 
authority is expressed in it. The experience of religion carries 
with it a constantly growing sense of the reahty of its object. 

The following extracts fi-om two writers of marked abihty, al- 
though not in entire accord in their points of view, are excellent 
statements of a philosophical truth. 

^ Fresh and instructive observations on the voluntary element in belief are 
contained in the work cited above, The Will to Believe, etc., by Professor 
James. 



22 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

" Not only is the subject active in perception, but he necessarily 
and inevitably has an inchoate consciousness of himself as a sub- 
ject in distinction from the subjects which that activity enables 
him to apprehend. . . . And the same is true of the idea of God 
which is presupposed in the division of the self from the, not-self 
and in all other divisions of consciousness. . . . And, hke the 
idea of self, the idea of God must at a very early period take some 
form for us, though it may not for a very long time take an ade- 
quate form. Man may hide his inborn sense of the infinite in 
vague superstitions which confuse it with the finite ; but he cannot 
altogether escape from it, or prevent his consciousness of the finite 
from being disturbed by it."^ 

" Anterior to and independent of philosophy, a tacit faith in the 
ego, in external things, and in God, seems to pervade human ex- 
perience ; mixing, often unconsciously, with the lives of all ; 
never perfectly defined, but in its fundamental ideas more or 
less operative ; often intellectually confused, yet never without a 
threefold influence in human Kfe. . . . Life is good and happy 
in proportion to the due acknowledgment of all the three. Con- 
fused conceptions of the three are inexhaustible sources of two 
extremes — superstition and scepticism."^ 

But we have to look at men as they are. As a matter of fact, 
" the consciousness of God " is obscure, more latent than ex- 
plicit, germinant rather than developed. It waits to be quickened 
and illuminated by the manifestation of God in nature and provi- 
dence, and by instruction. 

Writers on psychology have frequently neglected to give an 
account of presentiment, a state of consciousness in which feeling 
is predominant, and knowledge is indistinct. There are vague an- 
ticipations of truth not yet clearly discerned. It is possible to seek 
for something, one knows not precisely what. Were it discerned 
it would not have to be sought. Yet it is not utterly beyond our ken, 
else how could we seek for it ? Explorers and inventors may feel 
themselves on the threshold of great discoveries just before they 
are made. Poets, at least, have recognized the deep import of 
occult, vague feelings which almost baffle analysis. The German 
psychologists who have most satisfactorily handled the subject 

1 E. Caird, The Evolution of Religion, vol. i. pp. 184, 186. 

2 Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, second edition, amended (1899). 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN 23 

before us, as Lotze, Ulrici, Julius Miiller, Nitzsch, find in their 
language an expressive term to designate our primitive sense or 
apprehension of God. It is Ahiiung, of which our word " presage " 
is a partial equivalent. The apostle Paul refers to the providential 
control of nations as intended to incite men " to seek the Lord, if 
haply they might feel after Him, and find Him." ^ He is not 
known, but sought for. Rather do men feel after Him, as a blind 
man moves about in quest of something, or as we grope in the 
dark. This philosophy of religion is conformed to the observed 
facts. There is that in man which makes him restless without God, 
discontented with every substitute for Him. The subjective basis 
for religion, inherent in the very constitution of the soul, is the 
spur to the search for God, the condition of apprehending Him 
when revealed (whether in nature, or in providence, or in Christi- 
anity), and the ultimate ground of certitude as to the things of 
faith.^ 

1 Acts xvii. 27. 

2 For additional remarks on the origin of religion, see Appendix, Note 23. 



CHAPTER II 

THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD : THEIR FUNCTION IN 
GENERAL AND AS SEVERALLY CONSIDERED 

It will be clear, from the foregoing chapter, that the ultimate 
source of the belief in God is not in processes of argument. His 
presence is more immediately manifest. There is a native belief, 
arising spontaneously in connection with the feehng of dependence 
and the phenomena of conscience, however obscure, undeveloped, 
or perverted that faith may be. The arguments for the being of 
God confirm, at the same time that they elucidate and define it. 
They are so many different points of view from which we contem- 
plate the object of faith. Each one of them tends to show, not 
simply that God is, but what He is. They fill out the conception 
by pointing out particulars brought to light in the manifestation 
which God has made of Himself 

In presenting the several proofs of theism, which is the doctrine 
of a personal God, infinite in His attributes, we begin with the 
intuition which is denominated, in the language of philosophy, the 
Unconditioned, the Absolute. By " the Absolute " is signified 
that which is complete in itself, that which stands in no necessary 
relation to other beings. It denotes being which is independent 
as to existence and action. A cognate notion is that of the 
Infinite, which designates being w^ithout Hmit. The Uncondi- 
tioned, in form a negative term, is more generic. It means free 
from all restriction. It is often used as synonymous with "the 
Absolute," a term positive in its significance. 

We have an immediate conviction of the reality of the Absolute, 
that is, of being which is dependent upon no other as the condi- 
tion of existence and activity. When we look abroad upon the 
world, we discern a multitude of objects, each bounded by others, 
each conditioned by beings other than itself, none of them com- 
plete or independent. We perceive everywhere demarcation, 
mutual dependence, interaction. Looking within, we see that our 

24 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 2$ 

own minds and our mental processes are in the same way restricted, 
conditioned. The mind has a definite constitution ; the act of 
knowledge requires an object as its necessary condition. The 
spectacle of the world is that of a vast aggregate of interrelated 
beings, none of them independent, self-originated, self-sustained. 

Inseparable from this perception of the relative, the limited, the 
dependent, is the idea of the Unconditioned, the Absolute. It is 
the correlate of the finite and conditioned. Its reality is known as 
implied in the reality of the world of finite, interacting, dependent 
existences. The Unconditioned is abstract in form, but only in 
form. It is not a mere negative ; it must have a positive content. 
It is negative in its verbal form, because it is antithetical to the 
conditioned, and is known through it. But the idea is positive, 
though it be incomplete ; that is to say, although we fall short of a 
complete grasp of the object denoted by it. The reality of the 
Unconditioned, almost all philosophers, except Positivists of an ex- 
treme type, recognize. Metaphysicians of the school of Hamilton 
and Mansel hold that, as a reality, it is an object of immediate 
and necessary belief, although, according to their definition of 
terms, they do not regard it as an object of conceptive thought. 
But some sort of knowledge of it there must be in order to such a 
belief. Moreover, the Unconditioned is not merely subjective, it 
is not a mere idea, as Kant, in the theoretical part of his phi- 
losophy, holds. He makes this idea necessary to the order, con- 
nection, and unity of our knowledge. We can ask for no surer 
criterion of real existence than this.^ Unconditioned being is 
the silent presupposition of all our knowing. Be it observed, 
likewise, that the idea of the Absolute is not that of " the sum of 
all reality," — a quantitative notion. It is not the idea of the 
[/nrelated, but of that which is not 0/ necessity related. It does 
not exclude other beings, but other beings only when conceived 
of as a necessary complement of itself, or as the product of its 
necessary activity, or as existing independently alongside of itself. 
Again, the Absolute which is given in the intuition is one. It is 
infinite, not as comprehending in itself of necessity all beings, but 
as their ground and as incapable of any conceivable augmenting of 
its powers. It is free from all restrictions which are not self- 
imposed. Anything more respecting the Absolute is not here 
affirmed. It might be, as far as we have gone now, the universal 
1 Cf. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungeriy vol. ii. p. 426. 



26 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

substance, the impersonal deity of Spinoza, or it might be " the 
Unknowable " of Spencer. For the rectifying of these hypotheses, 
we depend on other considerations. 

The " arguments " for the being of God are usually classified as 
the ontological, the cosmological, and the teleological, or the 
argument of design. This last comprehends the evidences of 
design in Nature, together with the moral and historical arguments 
having a like probative value. 

I. The ontological argument. This makes the existence of God 
involved in the idea of Him. This argument does not profess to 
appeal to the intuition of the Absolute which is evoked in conjunc- 
tion with our perceptions of relative and dependent existence. The 
ontological proof begins and ends with the analysis of the idea. The 
proposition is that the fact of the existence of God is involved in the 
very idea. In the argument of Anselm, it is affirmed that the great- 
est (or the most perfect) conceivable being must be actual ; other- 
wise, a property, that of actuality, or objective being, is lacking. 
To this it has been answered that existence in re is not a constitu- 
ent of a concept. Anselm's contention was that it is not mere 
existence, but a mode of existence, a necessity of existence, that is 
the missing element in question. Still, it has been answered, the 
existence of a thing cannot be concluded from the definition of a 
word. In truth, that which Anselm presents in the shape of a 
syllogistic proof is really the rational intuition of Absolute Being.-^ 
From the mere idea, except on the basis of philosophical realism, 
a corresponding entity cannot be inferred. 

Descartes alleges a double basis for our knowledge of the exist- 
ence of God. The idea of an infinite self-conscious being is 
deduced from our own finite self-consciousness. That idea can- 
not be a product of the finite self. Its presence in the human 
mind can be accounted for, only by ascribing it to the Infinite 
Being himself. But, further, Descartes follows in the path of 
Anselm, and holds that the fact of the existence of God is in- 
volved in the definition of the Most Real Being, just as the equal- 
ity of the three angles of a triangle is involved in the definition of 
a triangle. Here, moreover, the intuition of the Absolute is cast 
into the form of a proof. 

Dr. Samuel Clarke's " demonstration " only establishes a priori 
the existence of a being eternal and necessarily existing. For of 
1 So it is interpreted by Harris, The Self-Revelation of God, p. 164. 



THE ARGUiMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 27 

the intelligence of this being the proof is a posteriori. Facts are 
adduced, — namely, the order and beauty perceived in the world, 
and the intelligence possessed by finite, human beings.^ 

There is cogency in what has been called the logical form of 
the a priori proof. It is adopted by Anselm and Aquinas. It is 
impossible to deny that there is Truth ; the denial would be self- 
contradictory. But those ideas and truths which are the ground- 
work of all our knowing — the laws of our intellectual and moral 
constitution — have their source without us and beyond us. They 
inhere in God. A Hke indirect proof has been presented as fol- 
lows. The human mind goes out of itself to know the world, and 
also, by exertions of the will, to mould and subdue it. Yet the 
world is independent of the mind that seeks thus to comprehend 
it and shape it to its purposes. This freedom of the mind implies 
that the world is intelligible, that there is thought in things. Al- 
though this proposition is denied by agnostics, yet it is tacitly 
admitted by them in all communications made from one to 
another. It implies that there is a common bond — namely, God, 
the Truth — between thoughts and things, mind and the world. 
Thought and thing, subject and object, each matched to the other, 
presuppose an inteUigible ground of both. This presupposition is 
latent in all attempts to explore and comprehend, to bring within 
the domain of knowledge, and to shape to rational ends, the world 
without. 

11. The cosmological proof. As usually stated, this proof is 
made to rest on the principle of causation. Whatever begins to 
be, owes its being to a cause not itself. The minor premise is that 
finite things begin to be. But this proposition, if it be admitted 
to be probably true, is not capable of full demonstration. The 
consequence is that we must fall back on the intuition of the Abso- 
lute Being. Here we find the origin and justification of the princi- 
ple of causation. The hypothesis of an infinite series or regress, 
does not meet this demand. It is equivalent to saying that there 
is no cause, that the notion of cause is illusive. A phenomenon 
— call it ^ — calls for explanation ; it demands a cause. If we 
are told that the cause of it is b, but told at the same time that in b 
there is no fount of causal energy, so that we have precisely the same 
demand to satisfy respecting b as respecting a, then no answer 
has been given to our fii-st question : we are put off with an eva- 
^See, on Clarke's argument, Dr. R. Flint, in Encycl, Brit. vol. ix. p. no. 



28 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

sion. That question takes for granted the reaUty of aboriginal 
causal energy. It proceeds from a demand of intelligence which 
is illegitimate and irrational, unless there be a cause in the abso- 
lute sense, — a cause uncaused. 

The existence of an eternal being, the cause of the world, is veri- 
fied. It is a reasonable judgment that the uncaused eternal being 
is a voluntary agent. For where do we get our idea of " cause? " 
For an answer to this question, we must look within. It is in the ex- 
ercise of will alone that we become conscious of power, and arrive at 
the notion of causation. We act upon the world exterior to self, 
and consciously meet with resistance from without, which gives us 
the consciousness of external reality. It has been already ex- 
plained that we have no direct knowledge of anything of the na- 
ture of cause, nor could we ever get such knowledge, except 
through this exercise of energy in voluntary action. The will 
influences intellectual states through attention, which is a volun- 
tary act. We can fasten our observation on one thing, or one 
idea, in preference to another. The nascent self-activity which 
we style the exercise of the will belongs to the earliest develop- 
ment of the mind. It is doubtful whether distinct perception 
would be possible without a directing of the attention to one after 
another of the qualities of external objects, or at least without 
such a discrimination among the phenomena presented to the 
senses as involves the exercise of attention. Now, were it not for 
this consciousness of causal activity in ourselves, in our own wills, 
were we merely the subjects of utterly passive impressions from the 
world without, the conception of cause would be wanting. 

Inasmuch as the only cause of which we are immediately con- 
scious is will, it is the dictate of reason to refer the power which 
acts upon us from without to will as its source. The theory that 
"forces " inhere in nature, which are disconnected from the agency 
of will, is without warrant from ascertained truth in science. If it 
be supposed that plural agencies, separate or combined, do exist, 
even then analogy justifies the behef that they are dependent for 
their being and sustained activity on a Supreme Will. In this 
case, the precise mode of the connection of the primary and the 
subordinate agency is a mystery, as is true of the muscular move- 
ments of the human arm, so far as they originate and are kept up 
by volition. That the will of God is immanent and active in all 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 29 *^ 

things, is a legitimate inference from what we know by experience 
of the nature of causation. 

The polytheistic religions did not err in identifying the mani- 
fold activities of nature with voluntary agency. The spontaneous 
feehngs of mankind in this particular are not beUed by the 
principles of philosophy. The error of polytheism lies in the 
splintering of that Will which is immanent in all the operations of 
nature into a plurality of personal agents, a throng of divinities, 
each active and dominant chiefly within a province of its own. 

How shall we confute polytheism? What warrant is there for 
asserting the unity of the Power that pervades nature ? 

In the first place, an example of such a unity is presented in 
the operation of our own wills. We put forth a multitude of voli- 
tions ; we exert our voluntary agency in many different directions ; 
this agency stretches over long periods of time ; yet the same 
identical will is the source of all these effects. To attribute the 
sources of our passive impressions collectively to a single self 
without, as our personal exertions consciously emanate from a 
single self within, is natural and rational. 

Secondly, what philosophers call the "law of parsimony" pre- 
cludes us from assuming more causes to account for a given effect 
than are necessary. The One self-existent Being, known to us by 
intuition, suffices to account for the phenomena of nature. To 
postulate a plurality of such beings — were a plurality of self-exist- 
ent beings metaphysically possible — would compel the conclu- 
sion that they are either in concord or in conflict. 

Thirdly, the fact that nature is one coherent system proves 
that the operations of nature spring from one efficient Cause. 
The progress of scientific observation tends to show that the 
world is a cosmos. Science is constantly clearing away barriers 
which have been imagined to break up the visible universe into 
distinct and separate provinces. The word "universe" signifies 
unity. Men speak of the heavens and the earth; but the earth 
belongs in the starry system. The earth is a planet, and with its 
associate planets is one of countless similar groups, not alien 
from one another, but hnked together in the stellar universe. 
Scientific theory more and more favors the reduction of " forces " 
to unity. The theory of the conservation of force is an illustra- 
tion. The unity of the world testifies to the unity of God. 

III. The argument of design. The personality of God is 



30 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

proved by the argument of design. God is known to be intel- 
ligent and free by the manifest traces of purpose in the constitu- 
tion of the world. 

When we attend to the various objects, the human mind in- 
cluded, of which the knowing faculty takes cognizance, we discover 
something more than the properties which differentiate one from 
another and the causes which bring them into being.^ In this 
very process of investigation we are struck with the fact that there 
is a coincidence and cooperation of what are named physical or 
efficient causes for the production of definite effects. These 
causes are perceived to be so constituted and disposed as to con- 
cur in the production of the effect, and — the elective preferences 
of the will excepted — to concur in such a way that the particular 
result regularly follows. This conjunction of disparate agencies, 
of which a definite product is the outcome, is the finality which 
is observed in Nature. But our observation extends farther. 
We involuntarily assume that this coincidence of causes is in order 
that the peculiar and specific result may follow. This assumption 
of design is not an arbitrary act on our part. It is spontaneous. 
The conviction is one inspired by the objects themselves. We 
see a thought realized, and recognize in it a forethought. 

All must admit that the observation of order and adaptation in 
Nature, inspiring the conviction of a designing mind concerned 
in its origination, is natural to mankind. It has impressed alike 
the philosopher and the peasant. Socrates made use of the illus- 
tration of a statue, as Paley, two thousand years later, chose the 
illustration of a watch. 

The proof from evidences of design is styled the argument from 
'* final causes." In this expression, the term " final " refers to the 
end for which anything is made, as distinguished from what we 
style the mechanical causes concerned in its origination. The 
end is the purpose in view, and is so called because its manifes- 
tation is last in the order of time. Thus, a man purposes to 
build a house. He collects the materials, brings them into the 
proper shape, raises the walls, and, in short, does everything need- 
ful to carry out his intention. The final cause is seen in the com- 

1 Be it observed that we use the term " causes," in this connection, in the 
sense in which it is popularly taken, and without reference now to the question 
whether forces distinct from the agency of the divine will and resident in 
matter are to be regarded as real. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 3 1 

pleted dwelling for the habitation of his family. The final cause 
of a watch is to tell the time. The efficient causes are all the 
forces and agencies concerned in the making of it and in the reg- 
ular movement of its parts. 

It is a familiar fact that a thing may be an end, and, at the same 
time, a means to another end more remote. When a mechanic 
is making a spoke, it is the spoke which is the immediate end in 
view. But the end of the spoke is to connect the rim of the 
wheel with the hub. The end of the wheel is to revolve upon 
the axle ; and the wagon is the end for which all its parts are 
fashioned and connected. The transporting of persons or things 
is a further end, ulterior but prior in the order of thought. 
There are subordinate ends and chief ends. We are not, there- 
fore, to ignore the marks of design, even in cases where the chief 
end, the ultimate purpose, may be faintly perceived, or be quite in 
the dark. 

It is sometimes said that " we cannot reason from the works of 
man to the works of nature." Why not? We are seeking to 
explain the origin of the scene that is spread before us in the 
world in which we live. Is the cause intelligent? We know what 
are the characteristic signs of intelligence. These signs are obvi- 
ous in the world around us. The marks of design in nature re- 
veal to us its intelligent author. For the same reason that we 
recognize an intelligent cause in countless products of human 
agency whose particular origin and authorship we know not, we 
infer an intelligent cause in things not made by man. In them 
we discern equal evidence of an end reached by the selection and 
combination of means adapted to accomplish it. If it is not a 
literal truth, it is far more than a fancy, when we say that they 
conspire to produce it. 

This mode of reasoning is often considered an argument from 
analogy. We sometimes apply the term " analogy " to a merely 
figurative likeness which the imagination suggests ; as when we 
speak of the " analogy " between a rushing stream and the rapid 
utterance of an excited orator. This is the diction of poetry. 
But when we have always found that certain properties in an animal 
are united with a given characteristic — for example, speed — we 
expect wherever we meet the same collection of properties, to 
find in their company this additional quality. This we look for with 
a certain degree of confidence even when no specific connection 



32 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

between such properties and their associate has yet been detected. 
This is an argument from analogy. 

J. S. Mill maintains that the argument of design is a genuine 
instance of inductive reasoning. "The design argument," says 
Mill, " is not drawn from mere resemblance in nature to the work 
of human intelligence, but from the special character of this resem- 
blance. The circumstances in which it is alleged that the world 
resembles the works of man are not circumstances taken at random, 
but are particular instances of a circumstance which experience 
shows to have real connection with an inteUigent origin, the fact 
of conspiring to an end. The argument, therefore, is not one of 
mere analogy. As mere analogy it has its weight, but it is more 
than analogy. It surpasses analogy exactly as induction surpasses 
it. It is an inductive argument." ^ 

But the argument of design has an a priori basis and 
consequently is universal in its application. Induction itself, 
as a method of reasoning, presupposes what is termed the 
uniformity of nature, or an order of nature — an established asso- 
ciation of observed antecedents and consequents. This convic- 
tion is not one of the intuitions constitutive of reason, and 
admitting of no possible or conceivable exception, but is a 
belief grounded on wide and long-continued experience, and 
thus serving as a " working postulate." But the idea of end 
or purpose as implied in all things and events, like the idea of 
what is termed efficient or physical or mechanical causation, 
has a strictly a priori origin. The idea of final purpose arises in 
our own experience in carrying out a desire by means chosen 
for this end. We are not less prompted to ask " what for " than 
to ask " how." Mechanism of itself explains nothing. The very 
term properly signifies means to an end. The world, if conceived 
of as only a vast mechanism, would be a fathomless mystery im- 
pervious to reason,^ and not what it really is, the spectacle of 
forces realizing ideas. The objection that to attribute design 
to material things and to the world as a whole is anthropomor- 

1 Three Essays on Religion ; Theisjn^ pp. 169, 1 70. 

2 For a clear exposition and proof of the a priori basis of the idea of 
Design, see Ladd, A Theory of Reality, ch. xiv. See also, Trendelenburg, 
Logische Untersuchungen, 3d ed., vol. ii. ch. ix., Zweck ; Dorner, System d. 
ChristL Glaubenslehre^ vol. i. pp. 252-257; N. Porter, The Hwnan Intellect^ 
pp. 592-619. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 33 

phic^ has no real weight. It shares this character in company 
with the idea of mechanical causation. In each case the human 
mind finds its own rational constitution reflected and embodied 
in external reality.^ Our knowledge of the world without con- 
sists in the projection of the categories in our mental processes 
into things without. It is undeniable that nature is a system, or 
proceeds according to a plan. The postulate of science is the 
rationality of nature. Science, in the words of Huxley, is " the dis- 
covery of the rational order that pervades the universe." Without 
this presupposition of a rational order, scientific investigation would 
be the pursuit of a chimera. Nature, it is taken for granted, is the 
embodiment of thoughts. All nature is but a book which science 
undertakes to decipher and read. When the student explores any 
department of Nature, it is to unveil its laws and adaptations.^ 

Because Nature is a rational system, it is adapted to our cogni- 
tive faculties. This correspondence proves that the author of the 
mind is the author of " the mind in Nature." What being, says 
Cicero, that is " destitute of intellect and reason could have pro- 
duced these things which not only had need of reason to cause 
them to be, but which are such as can be understood only by the 
highest exertions of reason ? " ^ What are the laws of Nature ? 
They are a description of the observed and customary interaction 
of things. To hypostatize " Law," either in the singular or the 
plural, if more than a figure of speech is meant, is to set up a 
crude species of Nature-worship. Laws are the rules conform- 
ably to which the unitary power operative in Nature, or, if one 
pleases so to think, the multiple forces in Nature, act. We can- 
not think of them otherwise than as prescribed, as ordained to 
the end that they may work out their effects. In other words, 
the order of Nature is an arrangement of intelligence. This 
explains the joy that springs up in the mind on the discovery 
of some great law which gives simplicity to seemingly complex 
natural phenomena. Thought gains access to reality through 
their mutual affinity. The mind recognizes something akin to 
itself. It discovers a thought of God. The norms according to 
which the knowing faculty discriminates, connects, and classifies 
the objects in Nature, imply that Nature herself has been pre- 

1 What is deducible a priori hy epistemological argument (see above, p. 18) 
can be shown inductively. 
^ De Nat. Deoruvi, ii. 44. 
D 



34 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

arranged according to the same norms, or is the product of mind. 
In conformity to the categories — time, space, quantity, quaUty, 
etc. — according to which the mind distinguishes natural objects, 
and thus comprehends Nature, Nature has been framed. That 
is to say, there is mind expressed in Nature. 

Science is the statement of the expressions of thought and 
purpose which are incorporated in Nature. A dog sees on a 
printed page only meaningless marks on a white ground. To us 
they contain and convey ideas, and bring us into communion with 
the mind of the author. So it is with Nature. Take a book of 
astronomy. If the stellar world were not an intellectual system, 
such a work would be impossible. The sky itself is the book 
which the astronomer reads, and the written treatise is merely a 
transcript of the thoughts which he finds there. This truth is pre- 
sented with much force and eloquence by one of the most 
eminent mathematicians of the age, the late Benjamin Pierce. 
He speaks of Nature as " imbued with intelligible thought," ^ 
of "the amazing intellectuality inwrought into the unconscious 
material world," ^ in which there is " no dark corner of hopeless 
obscurity,"^ of the "dominion of intellectual order everywhere 
found,"* "of the vast intellectual conceptions in Nature."^ To 
ignore God as the author of Nature as well as of mind is as 
absurd as to make " the anthem the offspring of unconscious 
sound." ^ "If the common origin of mind and matter is con- 
ceded to reside in the decree of a Creator, the identity ceases to 
be a mystery."'' Science is the reflex of mind in Nature. Nature 
is made up of interacting objects which constitute together one 
complete system.^ Order reigns in Nature, and universal harmony. 
Hence all these separate objects must be so fashioned and man- 
aged that they shall conspire to sustain and promote, and not to 
convulse and subvert, the complex whole. It follows that the 
existence and preservation of the system are an end for the 
reahzing of which the plurality of forces — if supposed to be plural 
— and their special activities are the means. That is. Nature in 
its totaHty exhibits design. 

1 Pierce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences (1883), p. 19. 

2 p. 20. * p. 25. 6 p. 32. 

3 p. 21. 5 p. 26. '^ p. 31. 

^ It was a noble title of Cudworth, however ambitious it may sound : 
" The True Intellectual System of the Universe." 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 35 

The belief in design has been at the root of scientific discovery. 
It has suggested the hypotheses which investigation has verified. 
Such was the source of Newton's discovery of the law of gravita- 
tion. Harvey was led to find out the true system of the circula- 
tion of the blood by observing that in the channels through which 
the blood flows, one set of valves opens toward the heart, while 
another set opens in the opposite direction. He had faith in the 
prude fice of nature. 

Robert Boyle tells us : — 

" I remember that when I asked our famous Harvey what were the 
things that induced him to think of the circulation of the blood, he 
answered me, that when he took notice of the valves in many parts of 
the body, so placed that they gave free passage to the blood toward the 
heart, but opposed to the passage of the venous blood the contrary way, 
he was invited to think that so prudent a cause as nature had not placed 
so many valves without a design, and no design seemed more probable 
than that, since the blood could not well, because of the intervening 
valves, be sent by the veins to the limits, it should be sent through the 
arteries, and returned through the veins, whose valves did not oppose 
its course that way." 

Kepler was moved to his discoveries by " an exalted faith, 
anterior and superior to all science, in the existence of intimate 
relations between the constitution of man's mind and that of 
God's firmament." ^ Such a faith is at the root of " the prophetic 
inspiration of the geometers," which the progress of observation 
verifies. 

The distinction between order and design, in the popular 
sense of the term, — meaning special adaptations, — is a valid and 
important one. Especially is this discrimination to be borne in 
mind since the advent of the modern theories of evolution. By 
order we mean the reign of law and the harmony of the world 
resulting from it. Both order and the relation of means to special 
ends imply intelligent purpose. Both order and special adapta- 
tion may and do coexist, but they are distinguishable from one 
another. For example, the typical unity of animals of the verte- 
brate class, or their conformity in structure to a typical idea, is an 
example of order. The fitness of the foot for walking, the wing 
for flying, the fin for swimming, is an instance of special adapta- 
tion. In either case there is an immanence of ideas. 

1 Pierce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences^ p. 1 7. 



36 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

What is meant by the explanation of any object of nature? 
What is it to explain any particular organ in a living being ? What 
is it but to define its end? There can be no explanation of an 
organism which does not presuppose adaptation. This is the 
meaning of organism : one whole composed of mutually depend- 
ent parts. Says Janet : — 

" Laplace perceived that the simplest laws are the most likely to be 
true. But I do not see why it should be so on the supposition of an 
absolutely blind cause ; for, after all, the inconceivable swiftness which 
the system of Ptolemy supposed has nothing physically impossible in 
it, and the complication of movements has nothing incompatible with 
the idea of a mechanical cause. Why, then, do we expect to find sim- 
ple movements in nature, and speed in proportion, except because we in- 
stinctively attribute a sort of intelligence and choice to the First Cause? " 

Janet does not consider the idea of design to be a priori. But 
this question, and the whole paragraph which we are quoting, 
imply it. He goes on to say : — 

" Now, experience justifies this hypothesis ; at least it did so with 
Copernicus and Galileo. It did so, according to Laplace, in the debate 
between Clairaut and Buffon ; the latter maintaining against the former 
that the law of attraction remained the same at all distances. '■ This 
time,' says Laplace, ' the metaphysician was right as against the geome- 
trician.' " ^ 

Teleology is evident in the structure of plants as truly as in the 
structure of animals. The development and growth, the forms 
and colors, the habits, of plants presuppose and reveal the 
idea which is directive of the energy operative in their produc- 
tion. Energy is not a substance. It is power dependent on 
guidance. The energy through which the tree, in defiance of 
inanimate forces, like gravitation, rises in the air, clothes itself 
in foliage and bears its proper fruit, until the antagonistic elements 
win the victory, and it yields to the verdict, " earth to earth," 
carries out an idea inseparable from it. " However we resolve the 
problem as to the connection of mind and matter, it is unques- 
tionably a simplification to infer that wherever a material system 
is organized for self-maintenance, growth, and reproduction, as an 
individual in touch with an environment, that system has a psy- 
chical as well as a material aspect." ^ The supposition of an inher- 

"^ Final Causes, p. i68. 

2 Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. i. p. 285. See, also, the context 
of this remark. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 37 

ent "mind-stuff" is self-contradictory and absurd, but not more 
absurd than the supposition of a mindless energy. 

When the root of a tree is observed to strike a path through 
the sand in quest of moisture, the rustic gardener has been known 
to express his recognition of design and of an inward stimulus by 
saying that " the root sees what it needs." In the inorganic 
realm, teleology is less striking, and may not be in a form to 
excite attention. So the question as to mechanical causes may 
fail to suggest itself to the casual observer. But to the en- 
lightened student, to the mineralogist, the geologist, the chemist, 
the manifestation of controlHng ideas or ends is not thus obscure.^ 
There are "sermons in stones." In the structure of the globe 
are revealed an historic rise and a progress from step to step.^ 

The evidences of controlling intelligence are peculiarly impres- 
sive in the organic kingdom. The very idea of an organism is 
that every part is at once means and end. Naturalists, whatever 
their opinion about final causes, cannot describe plants and ani- 
mals without perpetually using language which implies intention 
as disclosed in their structure. " Biological facts cannot be known 
at all except in relation to some teleological conception." ^ The 
" provisions" of nature, the " purpose " of an organ, the " posses- 
sion " of a part, " in order that " something may be done or averted, 
— such phraseology is not only common, it is well-nigh unavoid- 
able. The very word " function " means the appropriate action 
or assigned part. No writer uses the language of teleology more 
spontaneously and abundantly than Darwin. Huxley speaks of 
"every part" of an organism "becoming gradually and slowly 
fashioned, as if there were an artificer at work in each of these 
complex structures." " Step by step," he tells us, " naturalists 
have come to the idea of a unity of plan, or conformity of con- 
struction, among animals which appeared at first sight to be ex- 
tremely dissimilar." * 

It is when we consider the human body in its relation to the 
mind, that the most vivid perception of design is awakened. To 

1 Striking illustrations of " God's plan " are presented in the Lectures on 
Religion and Chemistry by Prof. J. P. Cooke (1864). It is shown what 
mighty forces, so to speak, are leashed, as it were, in the atmosphere and its 
elements. 

2 For proofs of design in Beauty, see Newman Smyth's Through Nature to 
Faith, ch, vii. ^ Ladd, Theory of Reality, p. 379. 

* Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. ii. pp. 319, 325. 



38 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

one not fettered to the opinion that the mind is itself the product 
of organization, and every purpose which the mind forms a phe- 
nomenon of matter — a phenomenon as necessary in its origin as 
the motion of the lungs — that is, to every one who is conscious 
of being able to initiate action, the adaptation of his bodily organs 
to the service of his intelligence is obvious and striking. The 
hand bears more clearly marks of being designed, than the tools 
which the hand makes. The eye displays contrivance more im- 
pressively than the optical instruments which man can contrive 
and fashion for the eye to use. I distinguish myself from the eye, 
and from my body of which the eye is a part ; and I know that 
the eye was made for me to see with. The end of its existence 
is apparent. It is what the word " eye " signifies. When we con- 
sider the adaptation of the sexes to one another, the physical and 
moral arrangements of Nature which result in the family, in the 
production and rearing of offspring ; and when we contemplate 
the relation of the family to the state and the relation of the fam- 
ily and the state to the kingdom of God, where the ideas and 
affections developed in the family and in the state connect them- 
selves with higher objects, the evidences of a preconceived plan 
seem irresistible. 

It is objected that in all the works of man the efficient cause is 
distinct and separate from the object in which the end is realized. 
In Nature, we are told, the efficient cause operates from within, 
and appears to work out the end without conscious purpose. The 
forces of Nature, it is alleged, appear to produce the order and vari- 
ety and beauty which we behold, of themselves, through no exter- 
nal compulsion, and at the same time without consciousness. In 
an organism the structure grows up, repairs itself, and perpetuates 
itself by reproduction ; but, it is averred, the active force by 
which these ends are fulfilled is not in the least aware of what it is 
doing. Thus, it is contended, the analogy fails between the arti- 
ficial products of human ingenuity and the works of Nature. It is 
a blind intelligence, it is said, performing works resembling those 
which man does, often less perfectly, with conscious design. With- 
out here subjecting to scrutiny this supposition of multiple unin- 
telligent forces in Nature, it is still indisputable that, if matter 
is *' blind," incapable of foreseeing the end to be attained, 
and of selecting appropriate means, it is necessary to connect it 
with the operation of an intelHgent author and his present agency. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 39 

The accurate mathematics of the planetary bodies, the unerring 
path of the birds, the geometry of the bee, the seed-corn sending 
upward the blossoming and fruit-bearing stalk, excite a wonder, the 
secret of which is the evident inadequacy of any " blind " power 
to effect these marvels of intelligence and foresight. 

A popular objection to the argument of design imputes to it the 
fallacy of confounding use with forethought or intention. Is not 
the eye for seeing ? Yes, it is answered, that is its use or function ; 
but this is not to say that it was planned for this use or function, 
for, when you affirm design, you go back to a mental act. The 
rejoinder is, that we are driven back to such a mental act, and 
thus to a designing intelligence. The relation of the constitution 
of the organ to the use irresistibly prompts the inference. The 
inference is no arbitrary fancy. Design is brought home to us, 
just as the relation of the structure of a telescope to its use would 
of itself compel us to attribute it to a contriving intelligence. 

It is objected to the argument of design that what are styled 
adaptations are nothing but " the conditions of existence " of 
objects in nature. These conditions being what they are, the 
various objects in which design is supposed to be shown could not 
be different from what they are. For example, the bird is said 
to be adapted to the air through which it flies, and, it is said, 
could not exist but for the air in which its wings are moved. 
The objection is equivalent to an attempt to explain the objects 
of nature by mechanical agencies and conditions. If the existence 
of the bird were traceable to primitive atoms, it would follow that 
these are purposeful. 

In truth we find use so related to structure that the thought of 
design springs up unbidden. 

By clear-sighted naturaUsts who give large room for the potential- 
ity of protoplasm and its plasticity under the conditions of environ- 
ment, design is recognized as the means to a preconceived end. 
Function or future use is seen to be the formative idea which 
specializes organs, and determines structure. An acute naturalist 
thus writes upon sexual differences, one of the most impressive 
illustrations of design : — 

" Instead of thus eliminating by degrees every trace of finality in sex- 
uality, till we merge into merely mechanical results, is it not just as log- 
ical to say that the sexuality of mammalia and flowering plants was 
potentially visible in the conjugation of inonera and plas7nodia ? and 



40 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

that the ' sexual idea ' has reigned throughout, function ever dominating 
structure, till the latter had conformed to the more complete function by 
becoming specialized more and more ? Or, in the words of Janet, ' The 
agreement of several phenomena, bound together with a future determi- 
nate phenomenon, supposes a cause in which that future phenomenon is 
ideally represented ; and the probability of the presumption increases 
with the complexity of the concordant phenomena and the number of 
relations which unite them to the final phenomena.' " ^ 

The writer last named also observes : — 

" Finality is certainly not destroyed, whether we believe organs to 
have been developed by evolution, or to have been created in some an- 
alogous manner to the fabrication of a steam-engine by man. For my 
own part, I still hold to the theory that uses cause adaptations^ on the 
principle that function precedes structure. Thus as a graminivorous 
animal has its food already (so to say) cut up into slices in grass-blades, 
it does not require scissors to reduce it to small pieces in order to make 
a convenient mouthful. But a carnivorous animal has a large lump of 
flesh in the shape of a carcass. It requires to cut it up. The action of 
biting, in order to do this previous to masticating, has converted its 
teeth into scissor-like carnassials ; and, as it can no longer masticate, it 
bolts the pieces whole. So, too, man would never have thought of mak- 
ing scissors, unless he had had something that he wanted to cut up. 
The parallel is complete ; only in the one case it is spontaneously ef- 
fected by the plasticity and adaptability of living matter, and in the other 
case it is artificially produced by the consciousness and skill of man." ^ 

To revert once more to the human eye : it is an instrument em- 
ployed by a rational being for a purpose, as he employs a telescope 
or a microscope. When we see how the eye is fitted to its use, we 
cannot resist the impression that it was intended for it. The idea 
of the organ we discern. As Whewell well puts it : " We have in our 
minds the idea of a final cause, and when we behold the eye, we 
see our idea exemplified. This idea then governed the construc- 
tion of the eye, be its mechanical causes, the operative agencies 
that produced it what they may." " Nothing," says an able 
writer, " has been proved against final causes when organic effects 
have been reduced to their proximate causes and to their deter- 
mining conditions. It will be said, for instance, that it is not 
wonderful that the heart contracts, since it is a muscle, and con- 

1 Janet, Final Causes, p. 55. "Final Causes," by Mr. George Henslow, in 
Modern Review, January, 1 881. 

2 Modern Review, loc. cit., p. 66. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 41 

tractility is an essential property of muscles. But is it not evident 
that if nature wished to make a heart that contracts, it behooved to 
employ for this a contractile tissue, and would it not be very aston- 
ishing were it otherwise ? Have we thereby explained the wonder- 
ful structure of the heart and the skilful mechanism shown in it? 
Muscular contractility explains the contraction of the heart ; but 
this general property, which is common to all muscles, does not 
suffice to explain how or why the heart contracts in one way 
rather than another, why it has taken such a form and not such 
another. ' The peculiarity presented by the heart,' says M. CI. 
Bernard, * is that the muscular fibres are arranged in it so as to 
form a sort of bag, within which is found the liquid blood. The 
contraction of these fibres causes a diminution of the size of this 
bag, and consequently an expulsion, at least in part, of the liquid 
it contains. The arrangement of the valves gives to the expelled 
liquid the suitable direction.' Now the precise question which 
here occupies the thinker is, how it happens that Nature, employ- 
ing a contractile tissue, has given it the suitable structure and 
arrangement, and how it rendered it fit for the special and capital 
function of the circulation." 

" The elementary properties of the tissues are the necessary conditions 
of which Nature makes use to solve the problem, but they in no way 
explain how it has succeeded in solving it. Moreover, M. CI. Bernard 
[a learned physiologist] does not decline the inevitable comparison 
of the organism with the works of human industry, and even often 
recurs to it, as, for instance, when he says ; * the heart is essentially a 
living motor 77tachine^ 2. force-pimip destined to send into all the organs a 
liquid to nourish them. ... At all degrees of the animal scale, the 
heart fulfils this function of mechanical irrigation.'' ... ' We may 
compare,' he says, '■ the histological elements to the materials man 
employs to raise a monument. . . . No doubt, in order that a house 
may exist, the stones composing it must have the property of gravita- 
tion ; but does this property explain how the stones form a house ? ' " 1 

It might be said of a locomotive that — the boiler of iron, with 
its capacity to hold water, being present, and the water being in it, 
and fire beneath it, and a chimney above for the smoke to escape, 
and pipes through which steam can pass connected with the boiler 
and wheels beneath on which the locomotive can roll — it is suffi- 
ciently explained. But the combination of these parts, in their 

1 Janet, Final Causes^ pp. 129-131. 



42 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

peculiar forms, and relation of the whole to that which the loco- 
motive does, are things which the foregoing statement altogether 
fails to account for. 

Kant has two criticisms on the argument of design. The first 
is, that it can go no farther than to prove an architect or framer of 
the world, not a creator of matter. But the special aim of the 
argument is to prove that the First Cause is intelligent. We 
will suppose for the moment that matter is such an entity as the 
criticism implies. The conclusion that the author of the wonder- 
ful order which is wrought in and through matter is also the 
author of matter itself still appears probable. For how can the 
properties of matter through which it is adapted to the use of 
being moulded by intelligence, be separated from matter itself ? 
What is matter divorced from its properties ? We cannot under- 
stand creation, because we cannot create. The nearest approach 
to creative activity is in the production of good and evil by our 
own voluntary action. How God creates is a mystery which can- 
not be fathomed, at least until we know better what matter is. 
Philosophers of high repute so far favor hypotheses akin to the 
Berkeleian, as to dispense with a substratum of matter, and to as- 
cribe the percepts of sense to the continuous action of the will of 
the Almighty. Whatever matter may be in its essence, we know 
that there is an ultimate, unconditioned cause. We know that this 
cause is intelligent and free. To suppose that by the side of the 
eternal Spirit there is another eternal and self-existent being, 
the raw matter of the world, " without form and void," involves 
the absurdity of two Absolutes limiting each other. 

The second difficulty raised by Kant is, that the existence of a 
strictly infinite being cannot be demonstrated from a finite creation, 
however extensive or wondrous. All that can be inferred demon- 
stratively is inconceivably vast power and wisdom. The validity 
of this objection may be conceded. The infinitude of the attri- 
butes of God is involved in the intuition of an unconditioned 
being, — the being glimpses of whose attributes are disclosed to 
us in the order of the finite world. 

These objections of Kant are in the Critique of Pure Reason. 
Elsewhere he brings forward an additional consideration. Admit- 
ting that the idea of design is essential to our comprehension of 
the world, he raises the point that it may be subjective only, regu- 
lative of our perceptions, but not objective or " constitutive." 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 43 

Not regarding the idea of design as a priori, like the idea of 
causation, he inquires whether it may not be a mere supposition, a 
working hypothesis, which a deeper penetration of Nature might 
dispense with. It is a sufficient answer to this scepticism that the 
thought of design is not artificially originated by ourselves ; it is a 
conviction which the objects of Nature themselves " imperiously " 
suggest and bring home to us. As Janet and other critics of Kant 
have pointed out, there are two classes of hypotheses. Of one 
class it is true that they are regarded as corresponding with the 
true nature of things ; of the other, that they are only a convenient 
means for the mind to conceive them. The question is, whether 
an hypothesis is warranted by the facts, and is perceived veritably 
to represent Nature. In the proportion in which it does this, its 
verity acquires fresh corroboration. Of this character is the 
hypothesis of design. 

We infer the existence of an intelligent Deity, as we infer the 
existence of intelligence in our fellow-men, and on grounds not 
less reasonable. 

" We are spirits clad in veils, 
Man by man was never seen ; 
All our deep communing fails 
To remove the shadowy screen." 

My senses take no cognizance of the minds of other men. I per- 
ceive certain motions of their bodies. I hear certain sounds 
proceeding from their lips. What right have I, from these purely 
physical phenomena, to infer the presence of an intelligence 
behind them? What proof is there of the consciousness in the 
friend at my side? How can I be assured that he is not a mere 
automaton, totally unconscious of its own movements ? The war- 
rant for the contrary inference lies in the fact, that being possessed 
of consciousness, and acquainted with its effects in myself, I regard 
Hke effects as evidence of the same principle in others. But in this 
inference I transcend the limits of sense and physical experiment. 
In truth, in admitting the reaHty of consciousness in myself, I take 
a step which no physical observation can justify. Were the brain 
opened to view, no microscope, were its power immeasurably aug- 
mented, could discover the least trace of it. 

The alternative of design is chance. The Epicurean theory, as 
expounded by the Roman poet Lucretius, made the world the re- 



44 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

^ suit of the fortuitous concourse of atoms, which in their motions 
and concussions, at length fell into the orderly forms in which 
they abide.^ The term " chance " does not denote the absence of 
cause — which would be an absurd supposition. The terms 
*' chance " and "accident" are applied to events undesigned and 
unforeseen. 

We use these words to denote an occurrence, or an object the 
particular cause of which is not detected, and which bears in it 
evident marks of forethought. I drop a handful of coins on the 
floor. They fly in diff'erent directions, and the directions in which 
they fly, we say, are due to chance. On the theory which we are 
considering, the world is accounted for as the final result of what 
is equivalent to an almost infinite succession of throws of dice. 
This cannot be said to be literally impossible, as it is not literally 
impossible that a font of types thrown into the air should come 
down in the form of Homer's Iliad. It is, however, so unlikely 
an occurrence as to be next to impossible. Imagine time to be 
given for the repetition of the experiment billions of times — the 
unlikehhood of the issue is not perceptibly diminished. Cicero, 
commenting on this theory of the Epicureans, after speaking of 
the vast orderly system of things beheld above us and around us, 
exclaims : " Is it possible for any man to behold these things, and 
yet imagine that certain solid and individual bodies move by their 
natural force and gravitation, and that a world so beautifully adorned 
was made by their fortuitous concourse? He who beheves this 
may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty 
letters — " the number of the letters in the Roman alphabet — 
" composed of gold or of any other matter, were thrown upon the 
ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the 
Annals of Ennius. ... If a concourse of atoms can make a 
world, why not a porch, a temple, a house, a city, which are 
works of less labor and difficulty?"^ But assume that the order 
of the universe is possible. The question is not whether it is pos- 
sible, but whether it is possible without an intelligent cause. The 
Strasburg Minster is possible, but not possible without an archi- 
tect and builder. 

If we accept the Lucretian hypothesis of the origin of the mate- 
rial universe, as we behold it, from the movements of atoms after 
countless myriads of chaotic combinations, we do not get rid of 

1 De Reru77i A^aiura^ i. 1021-1028. '^ De Nat. Deoj'tim^ ii. 37. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 45 

the proof of design. Why did the multitudinous atoms fail to 
combine in an orderly and stable way up to the moment when the 
existing cosmos was reached ? Manifestly they must have been, 
in their constitution and mutual relations, adapted to constitute 
the present structure of things, and no other. The present 
system was anticipated in the very make of the atoms, the constit- 
uent elements of the universe. The atoms, then, present the same 
evidences of design which the outcome of their revolutions presents. 
We might be at a loss to explain why the Author of Nature chose 
this circuitous way to the goal ; but that the goal was in view from 
the beginning is evident. The difficulty of getting rid of the evi- 
dence of final cause is illustrated in the circumstance that Haeckel 
actually attributes to atoms desire and aversion, or a soul both sen- 
tient and volitional 1 ^ 

The doctrine of evolution plays so conspicuous a part in the 
later discussions of Theism, that, at the risk of some repetition, it 
is worth while to examine critically its bearing on teleology. This 
doctrine undertakes to explain the diversity of animal species 
without resort to special acts of creation. As propounded by 
Darwin, it refers the origin of species to descent from a few pro- 
genitors, the origin of whom, in his work on this subject, he ab- 
stains from discussing. Some would extend evolutionary theory 
so far as to make life itself a development from inorganic forms, 
a view which thus far lacks support from scientific observation or 
experiment. In its widest extension, the network of evolutionary 
production is stretched over all things, living and lifeless, as far 
back as a nebulous vapor. Of those who believe in a genetic con- 
nection of animal organisms, some hold to " heterogenetic gen- 
eration," the production of new species by leaps, or by the 
metamorphosis of germs. Darwin's theory is that of unbroken 
development through minute variations. The law of heredity, 
under which like produces like, does not exclude in offspring 
slight variations without number. Darwin conceded that some 
inheritable variations might be produced by the conditions of the 
environment, but he maintained that, were variations perfectly 
indefinite in direction, his explanation of the origin of species 
would be tenable. The three causes in operation are the ten- 

^ See the passage, with comments, in J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 
vol. ii. B. ii. Br. i. § 6, ad ed. p. 399; also his Study of Religion, vol. i. p. 202. 



46 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIA^7 BELIEF 

dency of offspring to reproduce the forms of immediate or more 
or less remote ancestors, which Huxley denominates Atavism, the 
check on this tendency by a certain tendency to variation, and an 
influence from external conditions, such, for example, as climate.^ 
Among innumerable variations in structure, some are of such a 
nature as to give an advantage in the struggle for food and, gen- 
erally speaking, in the struggle for existence. There ensues — in 
the phrase suggested by Spencer — "the survival of the fittest." 
As the effect of mating and propagation, these profitable varia- 
tions grow, thereby imparting increased power, and lines of de- 
marcation are created and perpetuated. Thus, in inconceivably 
long periods, definite and stable species arise. The process is 
called "natural selection," being analogous to the course pur- 
sued in artificial breeding. The final eff"ect of this kind of snail- 
like advance through countless millenniums appears at last in the 
production of the human species. Another agency besides that 
of the struggle for existence, that of sexual preference, is a factor 
in working out the actual results of natural selection. 

The Darwinian doctrine, properly defined, lends additional 
strength to the argument of design. It brings before us a com- 
prehensive system, which advances from the lowest forms of ani- 
mal life until the terminus is reached in man. To quote the words 
of an eminent physiologist. Dr. W. B. Carpenter : — ■ 

" The evidence of final causes is not impaired. ' We simply,' to use 
the language of Whewell, ' transfer the notion of design and end from 
the region of facts to that of laws ; ' that is, from the particular cases 
to the general plan. In this general plan the production of man is 
comprehended." 

At the same time, evolutionary theory does not annul the evi- 
dence of adaptation in particular instances — in the eye, for ex- 
ample — when regarded in its place and function in the human 
body, as the organ of vision. This function is so clear and unde- 
niable that, whatever opinion may be held of the nature of per- 
ception as a mental act, to withstand the proof of intention in 
the structure of this organ of vision is well-nigh impossible. 
Had Paley claimed for the principle of design an a priori basis 
and a universal application, it would have been well. Critics of 
Paley, however, seem often to forget that he devotes a whole 

1 Huxley, Collected Essays^ vol. ii. pp. 397-403. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 47 

chapter (ch. ii.) to maintaining his ground on the supposition 
that the watch had the property of producing in the course of its 
movement another watch hke itself. But the countless particular 
instances in Nature, when seen in their connection and place in the 
entire system, give to the proof of foresight and plan a redoubled 
force. Besides the single pillar, however exquisitely carved, we 
behold its relation to the vast edifice in which it has a fitting place. 
The system of animate beings has been hkened to the cathedral of 
St. Mark, which owes its greatness " to the patient hands of cen- 
turies and centuries of workers," and is built up from materials 
drawn from every quarter of the globe. After this analogy, the 
lower forms of animal life have contributed to the upbuilding of 
the human body. Even foreshadowings of mind antedate that 
stage of being wherein man, with his introspective vision and gift 
of language, is differentiated from the animal species beneath him. 
But man, erect in form, with reason enabling him to comprehend 
Nature, to know himself and the world of which he is a part, and 
with conscience and the capacity of religion — man is the goal to 
which Nature from the outset points. Now, when man appears, 
an end is put to the gradations of physical development. There 
is " an arrest of the body " ; for by means of his intelligence man 
fashions tools and instruments of every sort which enable him to 
do without additional and more complex physical organs. He 
can interchange thoughts with his fellows. He dominates the 
forces of material Nature. Henceforth, evolution is psychical. It 
is the story of the rise and of the stages in the progress of 
human civilization. The prolonging of the period of helpless in- 
fancy is an essential condition of the evolution of motherhood. 
The permanent relation of husband and wife is dependent on 
physical characteristics which do not belong to the lower types of 
animal life. The being of the family, with the ties of affection 
developed within it, as well as the possibility of handing down a 
fund of knowledge to increase from generation to generation, are 
consequent on the birth of humanity with its distinctive peculiari- 
ties. These were foreshadowed before, but never brought into 
being. A loftier stimulus than the struggle for existence — namely, 
altruism, a benevolent interest in others, and the spirit of self-sacri- 
fice for their sake — sets bounds to self-love.^ 

^ For a more full statement of these particular features in the course of 
Evolution, see Drummond, The Ascent of Alan, especially chs. iii. vii. 



48 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

As to the agencies instrumental in building up the system of 
nature, it is plain that, in the first place, the origin of each requires 
to be explained ; in the second place, that their concurrence re- 
quires to be accounted for ; and, in the third place, that neither 
separately considered nor taken in combination — regarded as 
bhnd, unintelhgent forces — do they avail in the least to explain 
the order and adaptation of Nature which result from them. Why 
do living beings engender offspring like themselves? Why do 
the offspring slightly vary firom the parents and from one another ? 
How account for the desire of food ? How explain the disposi- 
tion to struggle to obtain it? Why is beauty preferred, leading to 
" sexual selection " ? How is it that these laws coexist and co- 
operate ? We see that they issue, according to the Darwinian view, 
in a grand result, a system of living beings. They are actually 
means to an intelligible end. They appear to exist, to be ordained 
and established, with reference to it. There is a " survival of the 
fittest." Who are the "fittest" except those who have been 
fitted to a given end? But how were "the fittest" produced? 
Natural selection merely weeds out and destroys the products 
which are not the fittest. It produces nothing. But it operates, 
in conjunction with the force described as " heredity," which 
includes " variabihty," to work out an order of things which 
plainly shows itself to have been preconceived. The selection, as 
far as it is positive, is dictated by stimuli within the organism. 
The fallacy of excluding design or final causes where it is possible 
to trace out efficient or instrumental causes would be astonishing 
if it were not so frequently met with. 

There is nothing in gradualness of development to disprove 
teleology. The progress of a pedestrian to a place a mile distant, 
by steps an inch long, presupposes volition and purpose as truly 
as if he had reached the place at a single bound. So it is with the 
continuity ascribed to Nature by the evolutionist. It were to be 
wished that all naturahsts were as discriminating as Professor 
Owen, who says : — 

" Natural evolution by means of slow physical and organic operations 
through long ages is not the less clearly recognizable as the act of all- 
adaptive mind, because we have abandoned the old error of supposing 
it to be the result of a primary, direct, and sudden act of creational con- 
struction. . . . The succession of species by continuously operating 
law is not necessarily a ' blind operation.'' Such law, however discerned 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 49 

in the properties of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a precon- 
ceived progress. Organisms may be evolved in orderly manner, stage 
after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the broad features of the course 
may still show the unmistakable impress of divine volition." ^ 

Evolution has to do with the how, and not the why, of phenom- 
ena. Evolution is a method, not an agent. Hence the evolution- 
ist is powerless against the teleological argument. This is true of 
the theory of evolution in the widest stretch that the boldest 
speculation has given it. This is conceded, even if not consis- 
tently, by its considerate advocates. This harmony of evolution 
with design is not denied by Huxley : — 

"The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not neces- 
sarily mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechan- 
ist the speculator is, the more firmly does he affirm primordial nebular 
arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are conse- 
quences, the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleolo- 
gist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial nebular 
arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the uni- 



verse. 



" 2 



This intention is recognized in the outcome as related to the 
concurrent agencies leading to it, as well as in the constitution 
of these primordial agencies, — recognized by the same faculty of 
reason through which we are made capable of tracing phenomena 
to their physical causes. The antecedent idea is throughout 
controlling. 

Darwin himself was often impressed by the marks of design in 
the development of animal life, but he confessed to a perplexity 
and consequent scepticism on this point from the circumstance that 
the phenomena of variation seemed to him to be due to "chance." 
" This," as he explained later, " is a wholly incorrect expression, 
which simply indicates an ignorance of the cause of each particu- 
lar variation." ^ He was puzzled by what he conceived to be the fact 
that variabihty shows nothing like adaptation to the prospective 
function of natural selection. Variability appeared to him to be, 

1 Transactions of the Geological Society^ vol. v. p. 90, quoted by Mivart, 
The Genesis of Species^ p. 274. 

2 Huxley, Critiqties, p. 307. For other passages from Huxley, one in a less 
philosophical spirit, see Appendix, Note 2. 

3 Origin of Species, vol. i. p. 137, vol. ii. p. 431. 

£ 



50 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

figuratively speaking, haphazard. The materials for natural selec- 
tion to do its work with, he compared to the numerous fragments 
of stone, of all shapes and sizes, which might be produced by the 
breaking up of a precipice by natural forces, including storm and 
earthquake. The builder picks out from the chaotic heap such 
fragments as he can work into the structure of his edifice. Hence 
to Darwin there seemed to be an antinomy, an irreconcilable con- 
tradiction ^ — like what he conceived to exist between free-will and 
foreknowledge. He has no thought of denying that there are laws 
of variation. " Our ignorance," he says, " of the laws of variation 
is profound." ^ But what they are, what the causes of variation 
in plants and animals are, is a problem which he left unsolved.^ 
"Darwin," says Huxley, " left the causes of variation, and whether 
it is limited or directed by extended conditions, perfectly open. But 
in the immediate consequences of variability, he could not perceive 
marks of design, but rather the opposite. In other words, he missed 
a link in the process of rational development ; there seemed to be 
a vacancy — a place where foresight and plan are suspended, and 
control is left to chance." ^ Be this as it may, the organism and 
the conditions in which it lives, work out a result which exhibits clearly 

1 Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 428. 

2 The impressions of Darwin are avowed with his wonted candor, especially 
in his correspondence with Asa Gray. Darwin's letters are in vol. ii. of The 
Life of Darwin. He speaks of" undesigned variability " (ii. 165), from which 
no definite results would follow. " I am conscious," he writes, " that I am 
in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world as we see it, is 
the result of chance, and yet I cannot look upon each separate thing as the 
result of Design " (ii, 146). He writes in an earlier letter : " I am inclined to 
look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether 
good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that 
this «/ ^z// satisfies me" (ii. 105). He would have no doubt of design if he 
could "thoroughly" believe that there is any other "imponderable force" of 
which life and mind are the " function " ; that is to say, if he could believe 
that there is a designer — distinct from mechanical forces active in natural 
selection — for the designing of things to be assigned to (ii. 170). But "the 
forces active in natural selection," that is, in living organisms and their envi- 
ronment, collectively taken, issue in the distinct species of animal and vege- 
table life. In this product a rationality is to be discerned which implies that 
intention is involved in the existence and activity of the agencies, collectively 
taken, on which it depends. ^ See, respecting Darwin's views, Appendix, Note 3. 

* Huxley's Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 205 ; also, his article on " Mr. Darwin's 
Critics," Collected Essays, vol. ii. p. 120. For the advance of the theory of 
evolution, he says, the great need is a theory of variation. Ibid.^ p. 182. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 5 1 

a designing agent. There is no room for denial that, as Mr. Sully 
expresses it, " every doctrine of evolution must assume some defi- 
nite initial arrangement which is supposed to contain the possibili- 
ties of the order which we find to be evolved, and no other 
possibility. This undeniable truth subverts every hypothesis 
which would substitute chance for design." 

But there is too much dissent from the supposition of limitless 
variability to reason upon it as a basis for scientific argument. 

Out of variations, says one critic, there must appear individual 
peculiarities adapted to give success in the struggle for existence. 
Then, in " this ocean of fluctuation and metaphorphosis," variations 
coinciding with these must appear, from generation to generation, to 
join on to them and to build up a highly organized species. The series 
of chances required to be overcome is infinite. If this were not the 
fact, the physiologist. Dr. W. B. Carpenter argues, the chances to be 
overcome in building up an organized species are infinite. " On the 
hypothesis of ' natural selection ' among aimless variations," says Dr. 
Carpenter, " I think that it could be shown that the probability is 
infinitely small that the progressive modifications required in the 
structure of each individual organ to convert a reptile into a bird could 
have taken place without disturbing the required harmony in their 
combined action ; nothing but intentional variations being competent 
to bring such a result," The proof of this prearrangement is furnished 
" by the orderly sequence of variations following definite lines of ad- 
vance. It would be necessary to presuppose a miracle of luck. There 
is not, as in artificial breeding, a seclusion of favored offspring from 
their kin. Moreover, mere selection on the basis of aimless variability 
will not account for organs and members, which, however useful when 
fully grown, in their beginnings do not help, and may hinder the 
animal in its struggle for existence. From the geological record, which, 
to be sure, is defective, support cannot be drawn for the theory." Profes- 
sor Huxley himself suggests that " further inquiries may prove that vari- 
ability is definite, and is determined in certain directions rather than 
others. It is quite conceivable that every species tends to produce 
varieties of a limited number and kind, and that the effect of natural 
selection is to favor the development of some of these, while it opposes 
the development of others, along their predetermined lines of modifica- 
tion." 1 The response of the organism to exterior influences is deter- 
mined by impulses within itself. This is the teaching of eminent 
naturalists, such as Owen and Virchow. Dana held that variation 
is limited by " fundamental laws." Gray, an able advocate of Darwin's 
general theory, teaches that " variations " — in other words, " the 

'^ Encycl. Brit., vol. viii. p. 751, art. "Evolution." 



52 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

diiferences between plants and animals — are evidently not from 
without, but from within ; not physical, but physiological." The 
occult power " does not act vaguely, producing all sorts of variations 
from a common centre," etc. "The facts, so far as I can judge, do not 
support the assumption of every-sided and indifferent variation. Vari- 
ation is somehow and somewhere introduced in the transit from parent 
to offspring. ... It is generally agreed that the variation is from 
within, is an internal response to external impressions. All that we 
can possibly know of the nature of the inherent tendency to vary must 
be gathered from the facts of the response. And these, I judge, are not 
such as to require or support the assumption of a tendency to wholly 
vague and all-directioned variation." ^ He affirms, that " as species do 
not now vary at all times and places, and in all directions, nor produce 
crude, vague, imperfect, and useless forms, there is no reason for sup- 
posing that they ever did."^ The philosopher Von Hartmann in- 
geniously compares natural selection to the bolt and coupling in a 
machine, but affirms that "' the driving principle," which called new 
species into existence, lay or originated in the organisms.^ Darwin, in 
his Descejti of Man^ frankly allowed that he has exaggerated natural 
selection as a cause, since it fails to account for structures which are 
neither beneficial nor injurious. Here, as in regard to the correlation 
of parts and organs, or " sympathetic " variation, he falls back on mystery. 
The fact of the sterility of hybrids has no explanation. In both cases, 
teleology cannot be dispensed with. 

The upshot of the matter is, that there is no occasion for puzzling 
over the design of chaotic and purposeless variations, — the stones 
of all shapes at the base of the precipice, — until a final verdict of 
natural science has been reached. Be the conclusion on this 
point what it may, the effects of variation must be considered an 
actual link in the series of causes, the outcome of which is an 
orderly and beautiful system of organized beings. 

Were there such a thing in nature as " aimless variability," the 
objection to the theistic argument, suggested by it, would be akin 
to the objection sometimes heard "from the waste of hfe and 
material " in organic nature, where the phenomena in question are 
familiar. In parts of both the vegetable and animal kingdoms, 

1 Natural Science and Religion, p. 50. So stout an advocate of Darwinian 
doctrine as Huxley remarks concerning the effect of external conditions, climate, 
etc., on variations, " In all probability the influence of this cause has been very 
much exaggerated." Collected Essays, vol. ii. p. 182. 

2 Darwijiiana, pp. 386, 387. 

8 See R. Schmid, The Theories of Darwin, etc., p. 107. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 53 

we find a redundancy of germs and eggs. Blossoms numberless 
bear no fruit. Facts of this sort do not militate against the proof 
of design. The only doubt which they could inspire, must relate 
to the perfection of wisdom and skill in the Creator. It might be 
answered that the very notion of wastefulness involves the need- 
less and useless sacrifice of that which is at the same time pos- 
sessed of value, and provided not without cost of money or labor. 
If all the difficulty connected by Darwin with variability existed, 
it would be well to bear in mind an observation of Huxley : 
"There is a wide gulf between the thing you cannot explain and 
the thing that upsets you altogether. There is hardly any hypothe- 
sis in this world which has not some fact in connection with it, 
which has not been explained."^ Gray presents from his own 
science of botany illustrations of usefulness in this "waste of life 
and material." One of them is afforded by the dift'erent means of 
dispersing the pollen of flowers.^ Darwin's own writings, one of 
which is entitled On the Contrivances in Nature for the Fertiliza- 
tion of Orchids, are quite helpful in this same direction. The 
Darwinian hypothesis, in its essential principle, goes far toward 
disposing of the sceptical difficulties of the kind referred to. This 
is through what has been denominated " the comprehensive and 
far-reaching teleology," by which " organs and even faculties, use- 
less to the individual, find their explanation and reason of being." 

Before closing this discussion, it is expedient to notice briefly a 
few not uncommon misconceptions of the argument of design, to 
which its advocates as well as dissentients are exposed. A fruitful 
error is the failure to perceive that a multitude of things in Nature 
which, regarded individually, might be judged to be unwise and 
even baneful, are incidental to a system of general laws, the ex- 
istence of which is in the highest degree expedient. The law of 
heredity brings in its train numerous evils, yet it is, on the whole, 
an essential benefit. 

A conclusion unfavorable to the skill or to the benevolence of 
the architect of the world, is frequently based on the absence of 
what is deemed an ideal perfection in some part of Nature — it 
may be an organ in the human body. Thus a justly distinguished 
naturalist, Helmholtz, criticises the structure of the human eye, 
contrasting it with certain optical instruments of human invention. 
Yet he closes with a statement which is the main point in the 

1 Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. ii. p. 466. ^ Darwiniana, pp. 375 seq. 



54 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

argument of design : " The adaptation of the eye to its function is, 
therefore, most coi7iplete, and is seen in the very limits set to its 
defects. Here, the result which may be reached by innumerable 
generations working under the Darwinian law of inheritance, coin- 
cides with what the wisest wisdom may have devised beforehand." ^ 
It has often been taken for granted by theologians, or wrongly 
assumed to be their contention, that the world and everything in 
it was designed exclusively as a manifestation of the Creator to 
the human race. Hence everything not capable of this limited 
construction has been looked upon as, to say the least, super- 
fluous. A lesson of modesty is contained in the familiar lines of 
Gray : — 

" Full many a gem of purest ray serene 
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear, 
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen 
And waste its sweetness on the desert air." 

Every gem and every blossom manifests in its very structure a pur- 
pose, even without reference to the impression it is adapted to 
make on human observers. But one of the motives of their 
creation may be the self-expression, for its own sake, of the 
Author of their being.^ Still further, the partial if not complete hy- 
pothesis has been virtually sanctioned that everything in the broad 
realm of nature was fashioned as an instrument to convey a specific 
benefit, larger or smaller, to the race of man, or to a portion of it. It 
is one thing to say that in innumerable arrangements the benevo- 
lence of God is convincingly discovered. But to affirm this of every 
being and thing, simply leads to the caricature of the true view. To 
call in the idea of a distinct purpose, to account for the creation 
of whatever the convenience of man, aided by his ingenuity, may 
turn to some use, argues either impiety or ignorance. Especially 
presumptuous and misleading is the implied omniscience which 
professes to comprehend in full the final end of creation and 
providence, and to derive thence an infallible criterion for setting 
the right value on whatever is and whatever occurs. Apart from 

^ See the comments of J. Martineau, A Study of Religion, vol. ii. B. ii. c. i. 

p. 343- 

2 Quite apart from peculiar adjuncts in his system, one may recognize truth 
in Professor Royce's emphatic words on what he calls the " Philistinism " 
"which supposes that Nature has no worthier goal than producing a man. 
Perhaps experiences of longer time-span are far higher in rational type than 
ours." The World and the Individual, p. 231. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 55 

revealed truth, it is clear enough that "we know in part" and 
are incompetent otherwise to apprehend 

" the one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 

It is conceded that the argument of design does not demon- 
strate the infinitude of God's power and wisdom. It is here that 
the ontological argument, or that which is the real gist of it, the 
intuition of the Infinite and Absolute, comes in to convert into a 
conviction the feeling that is begotten in the mind, in the form 
of an immediate suggestion by the inconceivably vast manifesta- 
tion of these attributes of God in the universe, as far as our human 
vision can extend. The unconditioned being is independent of 
limitations inseparable from finite beings. The intuition of 
unconditioned being involves the infinitude of his natural attri- 
butes. He is independent of temporal Hmitations ; that is, he is 
eternal. He is independent of spatial limitations ; that is, he is 
omnipresent. The categories of space and time cannot be ap- 
plied to him, — a truth which we can only express by saying that 
he is above time and space. His power is infinite ; that is, it 
can do everything which is an object of power, and it admits 
of no imaginable increase. His knowledge, since final causes 
reveal his personality, is equally without limit. 

IV. The moral argument. The righteousness and goodness of 
God are evident from conscience. The phenomena, which have 
been shown to be the immediate source of faith in God,^ on re- 
flection are seen to be vaHd in logic. Right is the supreme, sole 
authoritative impulse in the soul. He who planted it there, and 
gave it this imperative character, must himself be righteous. 
From the testimony of "the vicegerent within the heart" we in- 
fer " the righteousness of the Sovereign who placed it there." 

But what are the contents of the law? What has he bidden 
man, by " the law written on the heart," to be and to do ? He 
has enjoined goodness. When we discover that the precept of 
the unwritten law of conscience is love, we have the clearest and 
most undeniable evidence that love is the preference of the Law- 
giver, and that he is love. 

The argument from conscience is really a branch of the argu- 

^ See ch. i. 



56 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

ment from final causes. In this inward law there is revealed the 
end of our being, — an end not to be realized as if a part of 
physical nature, but freely. We are to make ourselves what our 
Maker designed us to be. The law is the ideal, the thought of 
the Creator, and a spur to its realization. It attests the holiness 
of God, as design in the external world reveals His intelligence. 
This truth is forcibly expressed by Erskine of Linlathen : " When 
I attentively consider what is going on in my conscience, the chief 
thing forced on my notice is, that I find myself face to face with 
a purpose — not my own, for I am often conscious of resisting it, 
but which dominates me, and makes itself felt as ever present, as 
the very root and reason of my being." "This consciousness of a 
purpose concerning me that I should be a good man — right, true, 
and unselfish — is the first firm footing I have in the region of 
rehgious thought ; for I cannot dissociate the idea of a purpose 
from that of a purposer ; and I cannot but identify this Purposer 
with the Author of my being and the being of all beings, and 
further, I cannot but regard his purpose toward me as the unmis- 
takable indication of his own character." ^ 

Is this conviction, which the very constitution of our being com- 
pels us to cherish, contradicted by the course of the world? 
There is moral evil in the world. But of moral evil, although He 
permits it. He is not the author. Nor can this permission be pro- 
nounced unrighteous or unbenevolent, until it is proved that there are 
no incompatibilities between the most beneficent system of created 
things, including beings endowed, to the extent with which men 
are endowed, with free agency, and the exclusion, by direct power, 
of all abuse of that divine gift by which man resembles his Crea- 
tor. Permission on this ground is not to be corifounded with 
preference of moral evil to its opposite. If it were made probable 
that the bare permission of moral evil, so far as it actually exists 
in the world, is inconsistent with infinite power and infinite good- 
ness, or with both, the result would simply be a contradiction 
between the revelation of God in our intuition of unconditioned 
being and in our own moral nature, and the disclosure of Him in 
the course of the world. ^ 

We are in a world that abounds in suffering. How shall this 
be reconciled with benevolence in the Creator? Much weight 



t>' 



1 The Spiritual Order and Other Papers, pp. 47, 48. "- See Appendix, Nolo 4. 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 57 

is to be given to the consideration of the effects flowing of neces- 
sity from a system of general laws, notwithstanding the advantages 
of such a system. The suggestions relative to the occasions and 
beneficent offices of pain and death, which are presented by such 
writers as James Martineau, in his work entitled A Study of Reli- 
gion, are helpful. Especially is the fact of moral evil to be taken 
into the account when a solution is sought for the problem of 
physical evil, its concomitant and so often its consequence. Let 
it be freely granted, however, that no explanations that man can 
devise avail to clear up altogether the mystery of evil. It is only 
a small part of the system of things that falls under our observa- 
tion in the present stage of our being. It is not by an inductive 
argument, by showing a preponderance of good over evil in the 
arrangements of nature, that the mind is set at rest. There is no 
need of an argument of this kind. There is need of faith, but 
that faith is rational. We find, as we have pointed out, in our 
own moral constitution a direct and full attestation of the good- 
ness of God. Our moral constitution is affirmed, by a class of 
evolutionists, to be a gradual growth from a foundation of animal 
instincts. Let this speculation go for what it may be worth. The 
same theory is advanced respecting the human intellect. Yet the 
intellect is assumed to be an organ of knowledge. There is no 
avoiding this conclusion, else all science, evolutionary science in- 
cluded, is a castle in the air. If the intellect is entitled to trust, 
so equally is the moral nature. Are the righteousness and good- 
ness of God called in question on the ground of perplexing facts 
observed in the structure and course of the world? Where do 
we get the qualifications for raising such inquiries or rendering an 
answer to them ? It must be from ideals of character which we 
find within ourselves, and from the supreme place accorded to 
the moral law which is written on the heart. But whence come 
these moral ideals? Who enthroned the law of righteousness in 
the heart? Who inscribed on the tablets of the soul the assertion 
of the inviolable authority of right and the absolute worth of love 
as a motive of action? In a word, our moral constitution is itself 
given us of God, and if it be not the reflection of His character, it 
is, for aught we can say, a false light ; in which case all the ver- 
dicts resting upon it, with all the queries of scepticism as to the 
goodness of God, may be illusive. The arraignment of the char- 
acter of God on the ground of alleged imperfections in nature or 



58 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

of seemingly harsh or unjust occurrences in the course of events, 
is therefore suicidal. The revelation of God's character is in our 
moral constitution. The voice within us, which is uttered in the 
sacred impulse of duty and in the law of love, is His voice. There 
we learn what He approves, what He requires, what He rewards. 
When this proposition is denied, we lose our footing ; we cut 
away the ground for trust in our own capacity for moral criticism. 

Man has not one originating cause and the world another. 
The existence and supreme authority of conscience imply that in 
the on-going of the world righteousness holds sway. If there is 
a moral purpose underlying the course of things, then a righteous 
Being is at the helm. What confusion worse than chaos in the 
idea that while man himself is bound to be actuated by a moral 
purpose, the universe in which he is to act his part exists for no 
moral end, and that through the course of things no moral pur- 
pose runs ! 

Even Kant, who bases our conviction as to the fundamental 
truths of religion on moral grounds, and asserts for it, not a strictly 
logical, but a moral, certainty, nevertheless declares this convic- 
tion to be inevitable where there exist right moral dispositions. 
"The only caution to be observed," he says, "is that this faith of 
the intellect ( Vernunftglaube) is founded on the assumption of 
moral tempers." If one were utterly indifferent to moral laws, 
even then the conclusion " would still be supported indeed by 
strong arguments from analogy, but not by such as an obstinate 
sceptical bent might not overcome." 

It is not my object in these remarks to draw out in full the 
proofs of the existence and the moral attributes of God. It is 
rather to illustrate the relation in which these proofs stand to 
those perceptions, inchoate and spontaneous in the experiences 
of the soul, which are the ultimate subjective source of religion, 
and on which the living appreciation of the revelation of God in 
external nature is contingent. Let it be observed, moreover, that 
these native spiritual experiences of dependence, of obligation 
and accountableness, of hunger for fellowship with the Infinite 
One, wherein religion takes its rise and has its root, are them- 
selves to be counted as proofs of the reality of the object impHed 
in them. They are significant of the end for which man was 
made. They presuppose God. 

It is true that all our knowledge rests ultimately on an act of 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 59 

faith which finds no warrant in any process of reasoning. We 
cannot climb to this trust on the steps of a syllogism. We are 
obliged to start with a confidence in the veracity of our intellec- 
tual faculties ; and this we have to assume persistently in the 
whole work of acquiring knowledge. Without this assumption we 
can no more infer anything or know anything than a bird can fly 
in a vacuum. All science reposes on this faith in our own minds, 
which impUes and includes faith in the Author of the mind. This 
primitive faith in ourselves is moral in its nature. So of all that 
truth which is justly called self-evident. No arguments are to be 
adduced for it. In every process of reasoning it is presupposed. 
We can prove nothing except on the basis of propositions that 
admit of no proof. But if we leave out of account the domain of 
self-evident truth, which is ground common to both religion and 
science, religious beliefs, as far as they are sound, are based on 
adequate evidence. 

V. The historical argument. The philosophy of history is 
synonymous with the unveiling of the plan revealed in the course 
of human affairs. The discovery of this plan is the chief motive 
in the study of history, without which it would have, as it has been 
truly said, little more interest than the record of the battles of 
crows and daws. Divine providence is discerned in the fact that 

— "through the ages one increasing purpose runs." 

Hegel presents us with profound observations on the philosophy of 
history, notwithstanding the alloy of a priori speculation mingled 
with them. The thought that reason is the " sovereign of the 
world," he tells us, is the hypothesis in the domain of history 
which it verifies. Hegel shares in the approval given by Socrates 
to the remark of Anaxagoras that reason or intelligence governs 
the world, and quotes the saying of Aristotle that in this saying 
Anaxagoras " appeared as a sober man among the drunken," in 
ascribing nothing to chance. " The truth," Hegel adds, " that a 
providence, that of God, presides over the events of the world, 
consorts with that proposition." ^ 

History, as containing at once a providential order and a moral 
order enclosed within it, discovers God. Events do not take 
place in a chaotic series. A progress is discernible, an orderly 
succession of phenomena, the accompHshment of ends by the 

1 Hegel, Philosophy of History, Sibree's Transl., pp. 9, 12, 13. 



60 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

concurrence of agencies beyond the power of individuals to origi- 
nate or combine. There is a Power that " makes for righteous- 
ness." Amid all the disorder of the world, as Bishop Butler has 
convincingly shown, there is manifested on the part of the Power 
which governs, an approbation of right and a condemnation of 
wrong, analogous to the manifestation of justice and holiness 
which emanates from righteous rulers among men. If righteous- 
ness appears to be but imperfectly carried out, it is an indication 
that in this life the system is incomplete, and that here we see 
only its beginnings. In order to disprove the rectitude or the 
power of the divine Sovereign, the assailant must first make good 
the contention that the system as here seen is complete. On him 
rests the burden of proof. 

It is objected to the belief that God is personal, that personality 
implies limitation, and that, if personal, God could not be infinite 
and absolute. " Infinite " (and the same is true of " absolute ") 
is an adjective, not a substantive. When used as a noun, pre- 
ceded by the definite article, it signifies not a being, but an ab- 
straction. When it stands as a predicate, as remarked before, it 
means that the subject, be it space, time, or some quality of a 
being, is without limit. Thus, when I affirm that space is infinite, 
I express a positive perception, or thought. I mean not only that 
imagination can set no bounds to space, but also that this inability 
is owing, not to any defect in the imagination or conceptive fac- 
ulty, but to the nature of the object. When I say that God is in- 
finite in power, I mean that He can do all things which are objects 
of power, or that His power is incapable of increase. No amount 
of power could be added to the power of which He is possessed. It 
is only when " the Infinite " is erroneously taken as the synonym 
of the sum of all existence, that personaHty is made to be incom- 
patible with God's infinitude. No such conception of Him is 
needed for the satisfaction of the reason or the heart of man. 
Enough that He is the ground of the existence of all beings outside 
of Himself, or the creative and sustaining Power. There are no 
limitations upon His power which He has not voluntarily set. Such 
limitation — as in giving fife to rational agents capable of self- 
determination, and in allowing them scope for its exercise — is not 
imposed on Him, but depends on His own choice. 

An absolute being is independent of all other beings for its 



THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE BEING OF GOD 6 1 

existence and for the full realization of its nature. It is con- 
tended that inasmuch as self-consciousness is conditioned on the 
distinction of the ego from the non-ego^ the subject from the object, 
a personal being cannot have the attribute of self-existence, can- 
not be absolute. Without some other existence than himself, a 
being cannot be self-conscious. The answer to this is, that the 
premise is an unwarranted generalization from what is true in the 
case of the human, finite, dependent personahty of man, which is 
developed in connection with a body, and is only one of numer- 
ous finite personalities under the same class. To assert that self- 
consciousness cannot exist independently of such conditions, 
because it is through them that I come to a knowledge of myself, 
is a great leap in logic. The proposition that man is in the image 
of God does not necessarily imply that the divine intelligence is 
subject to the restrictions and infirmities that belong to the human. 
It is not implied that God ascertains truth by a gradual process of 
investigation or of reasoning, or that He dehberates on a plan of 
action, and casts about for the appropriate means of executing it. 
These Hmitations are characteristic, not of intelligence in itself, 
but of finite intelligence. It is meant that He is not an imper- 
sonal principle or occult force, but is self-conscious and self- 
determining. Nor is it asserted that He is perfectly comprehensible 
by us. Far from it. It is not pretended that we are able fully to 
think away the limitations which cleave to us in our character as 
dependent and finite, and to frame thus an adequate conception 
of a person infinite and absolute. Nevertheless, the existence of 
such a person, whom we can apprehend if not comprehend, is 
verified to our minds by sufficient evidence. Pantheism, with its 
immanent Absolute, void of personal attributes, and its self-devel- 
oping universe, postulates a deity limited, subject to change, and 
reaching self-consciousness — if it is ever reached — only in men. 
And Pantheism, when it denies the free and responsible nature of 
man, maims the creature whom it pretends to deify, and anni- 
hilates not only morality, but religion also, in any proper sense of 
the term. 

The citadel of Theism is in the consciousness of our own per- 
sonality. Within ourselves God reveals himself more directly than 
through any other channel. He impinges, so to speak, on the 
soul which finds in its primitive activity an intimation and impli- 
cation of an unconditioned Cause on whom it is dependent, — a 



62 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Cause self-conscious like itself, and speaking with holy authority 
in conscience, wherein also is presented the end which the soul 
is to pursue through its own free self-determination, — an end 
which could only be set by a Being both intelligent and holy. 
The yearning for fellowship with the Being thus revealed — indis- 
tinct though it be, well-nigh stifled by absorption in finite objects 
and in the vain quest for rest and joy in them — is inseparable 
from human nature. There is an unappeased thirst in the soul 
when cut off from God. It seeks for " living water." 

Atheism is an insult to humanity. A good man is a man with 
a purpose, a righteous purpose. He aims at well-being, — at the 
well-being of himself and of the world of which he forms a part. 
This end he pursues seriously and earnestly, and feels bound to 
pursue, let the cost to himself be what it may. To tell him that 
while he is under a sacred obligation to have this purpose, and 
pursue this end, there is yet no purpose or end in the universe in 
which he is acting his part — what is this but to offer a gross affront 
to his reason and moral sense? He is to abstain from frivolity; 
he is to act from an intelligent purpose, for the accomplishment 
of rational ends ; but the universe, he is told, is the offspring of 
gigantic frivolity. The latter is without purpose or end; there 
chance or blind fate rules. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES : PANTHEISM, POSITIVISM, 
MATERIALISM, AGNOSTICISM 

The three inseparable, yet distinct, data of consciousness are 
self, material nature, and God. Pantheism would merge the first 
two in the third — in its essence an impersonal Deity. Materi- 
alism would merge the first and the third in the second, and so 
deify matter. Positivism abjures belief in all three, and resolves 
the universe, so far as we have any means of knowing, into a 
" Succession of appearances." Agnosticism would place behind 
these phenomena an inscrutable " energy," its definition of the 
third element. 

Pantheism identifies God with the world, or the sum total of 
being. It differs from Atheism in holding to something besides 
and beneath finite things, — an all-pervading Cause or Essence. 
It differs from Deism in denying that God is separate from the 
world, and that the world is sustained and guided by energies 
exerted from without. It does not differ from Theism in affirm- 
ing the immanence of God, for on this Theism likewise insists ; 
but it differs from Theism in denying to the immanent Power dis- 
tinct consciousness and will, and an existence not dependent on 
the world. Pantheism denies, and Theism asserts, creation. 
With the denial to God of will and conscious intelligence, Panthe- 
ism excludes design. Finite things emerge into being, and pass 
away, and the course of nature proceeds through the perpetual 
operation of an agency which has no cognizance of its work except 
so far as it may arrive at self-consciousness in man. 

In the system of Spinoza, the most celebrated and influential 
of modern Pantheists, it is asserted that there is, and can be, but 
one substance, — una et ujiica substantia. Of the infinite number 
of infinite attributes which constitute the one substance, two are 
discerned by us, — extension and thought. These, distinct in our 
perception, are not disparate in the substance. Both being mani- 

63 



64 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

festations of a simple identical essence, the order of existence is 
parallel to the order of thought. All individual things are modes 
of one or the other of the attributes, that is, of the substance as far 
as it is discerned by us. There is a complete correspondence or 
harmony, although there is no reciprocal influence, between bodies 
and minds. But the modes do not make up the substance, which 
is prior to them ; they are transient as ripples on the surface of 
the sea. The imagination regards them as entities ; but reason 
looks beneath them, to the eternal essence of which they are but 
a fleeting manifestation. 

No philosopher, with the possible exception of Aristotle, has 
been more lauded for his rigorous logic than Spinoza. In truth, 
few philosophers have included more fallacies in the exposition of 
their systems. The pages of the Ethics swarm with paralogisms, 
all veiled under the forms of rigid mathematical statement. His 
fundamental definitions, whatever verbal precision may belong to 
them, are, as regards the realities of being, unproved assumptions. 
His reasoning, from beginning to end, is vitiated by the realistic 
presupposition that the actual existence of a being can be inferred 
from the definition of a word. He falls into this mistake of find- 
ing proof of the reality of a thing from the contents of a concep- 
tion, in his very first definition, where he says, " By that which is 
the cause of itself, I understand that whose essence involves exist- 
ence, or that whose nature can only be conceived as existent." 
His argument is an argument from definitions, without having 
offered proof of the existence of the thing defined. Spinoza fails 
to prove that only one substance can exist, and that no other sub- 
stance can be brought into being which is capable of self-activity, 
though dependent for the origin and continuance of its existence 
upon another. Why the one and simple substance should have 
modes ; why it should have these discoverable modes, and no 
other ; how the modes of thought and extension are made to run 
parallel with each other ; how the infinite variety of modes, em- 
bracing stars and suns, men and animals, minds and bodies, and 
all other finite things, are derived in their order and place, — 
these are problems with regard to which the system of Spinoza, 
though professing to explain the universe by a method purely de- 
ductive, leaves us wholly in the dark.^ 

iQne of the hard questions proposed to Spinoza by Tschirnhausern, his 
correspondent, was, how the existence and variety of external things is to be 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 65 

The ideal Pantheism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel pursues 
a different path. It undertakes still to unveil the Absolute Being, 
and from the Absolute to trace the evolution of all concrete exist- 
ences, mental and material. The Absolute in Fichte is the univer- 
sal ego, of which individual minds, together with external things, 
the objects of thought, are the phenomenal product, — a univer- 
sal ego which is void of consciousness, and of which it is vain to 
attempt to form a conception. The impression we have of exter- 
nality is from the check put upon the self-activity of the mind by 
its own inward law. From this Solipsism — Panegoism, it is some- 
times styled — Fichte sought in his ethical philosophy for a place 
for a plurality of egos, and a substitute for Theism in the system of 
moral order. Schelling, avoiding Idealism, made the Absolute the 
point of indifference and common basis of subject and object. 
For the perception of this impersonal Deity, which is assumed 
to be indefinable, and not an object of thought, he postulated an 
impossible faculty of intellectual intuition, wherein the individual 
escapes from himself, and soars above the conditions or essential 
limits of conscious thinking in a finite mind. Hegel advances 
upon the same path. He discerns and repudiates the one-sided 
position of Kant in resolving our knowledge of nature, beyond the 
bare fact of its existence, into a subjective process. The divine 
reason is immanent in the world and apprehensible by man. There 
is a rationaHty in nature and in human history. But Hegel swings 
to the opposite extreme, and identifies object and subject, thing 
and thinker, as in essence one. Starting, like Schelling, with this 
assumption that subject and object, thought and thing, are identi- 
cal, he ventures on the bold emprise of setting down all the suc- 
cessive stages through which thought in its absolute or most general 
form, by means of a kind of momentum assumed to inhere in it, 
develops the entire chain of concepts, or the whole variety and 
aggregate of particular existences, up to the point where, in the 
mental movement of the philosopher, the universe thus constituted 
attains to complete self-consciousness. In the logic of Hegel, we 
are told, the universe reveals itself to the spectator with no aid 
from experience in the process of its self-unfolding. The complex 
organism of thought, which is identical with the world of being, 
evolves itself under his eye. 

deduced from the attribute of extension. See Pollock, Spinoza, His Life and 
Philosophy, p. 173. 



66 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

There is a difficulty, to begin with, in this self- evolving of " the 
idea." Motion is presupposed, and motion is a conception de- 
rived from experience. Moreover, few critics at present would 
contend that all the hnks in this metaphysical chain are forged of 
solid metal. There are breaks which are filled up with an unsub- 
stantial substitute for it. Transitions are effected — for example, 
where matter, or life, or mind emerge — rather by sleight of hand 
than by a legitimate apphcation of the logical method. But if it 
were granted that the edifice is compact, and coherent in all its 
parts, it is still only a ghostly castle. It is an ideal skeleton of a 
universe. Its value is at best hypothetical and negative. The 
universe is more than a string of abstractions. This was forcibly 
stated in the criticism by Schelling in his later system. If a world 
were to exist, and to be rationally framed, it might possibly be con- 
formed to this conception or outline. Whether the world is a real- 
ity, experience alone can determine. The highest merit which can 
be claimed for the ideal scheme of Hegel is such as belongs to the 
plans of an architect as they are conceived in his mind, before a 
beginning has been made of the edifice, or the spade has touched 
the ground. The radical fault of the Hegelian system, and its 
erroneous implications, are not averted by the numerous enlight- 
ened comments on the constitution of nature, and especially on 
the philosophy of history.^ 

Independently of other difficulties in the way of the various 
theories of Pantheism which have been propounded in ancient 
and modern times, it is a sufficient refutation of them that they 
stand in contradiction to consciousness, and that they are at vari- 
ance with conscience. It is through self-consciousness that our 
first notion of substance and of unity is derived. The manifold 
operations of thought, feeling, imagination, memory, affection, con- 
sciously proceed from a single source within. The mind is revealed 
to itself as a separate, substantial, undivided entity. Pantheism, 
in resolving personal being into a mere phenomenon, or a phase 
of an impersonal essence, and in abolishing the gulf of separation 
between the subject and the object, clashes with the first and 
clearest affirmation of consciousness.^ 

1 Of course, there was a Theistic school of interpreters of Hegel. Others 
have sought to graft Theism upon Hegehanism. The consideration of these 
phases of opinion, including the more recent " Neo-Hegelian " speculation, 
would be out of place here. 

2 See Appendix, Note 5. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-TIIEISTIC THEORIES 6/ 

Every system of Pantheism is necessitarian. It is vain to say, 
that, where there is no constraint from without, there is freedom 
of the will. A plant growing out of a seed would not become free 
by becoming conscious. The determinism which refers all volun- 
tary action to a force within, which is capable of moving only on 
one line, and is incapable of alternative action, is equivalent, in its 
bearing on responsibility, to fatalism. On this theory, moral 
accountableness is an illusion.^ No distinction is left between 
natural history and moral history. Pantheism sweeps away the 
absolute antithesis between good and evil, the perception of which 
is the very life of conscience. Under that philosophy, evil, wher- 
ever it occurs, is normal. Evil, when viewed in all its relations, is 
good. It appears to be the opposite of good, only when it is con- 
templated in a more restricted relation, and from a point of view 
too confined. Such a judgment respecting moral evil undermines 
morality in theory, and, were it acted on, would corrupt society. 
It would dissolve the bonds of obligation. In the proportion in 
which the unperverted moral sense corresponds to the reality of 
things, to that extent is Pantheism in all of its forms disproved. 

Positivism is the antipode of Pantheistic philosophy. So far 
from laying claim to omniscience, it goes to the other extreme of 
disclaiming all knowledge of the origin of things or of their interior 
nature. A fundamental principle of Positivism, as expounded by 
Comte, is the ignoring of both efficient and final causes. There is 
no proof, it is affirmed, that such causes exist. Science takes 
notice of naught but phenomena presented to the senses. The 
whole function of science is to classify facts under the rubrics of 
similarity and sequence. The sum of human knowledge hath this 
extent, no more. As for any links of connection between phenom- 
ena, or any plan under which they occur, science knows nothing 
of either. 

But where do we get the notion of similarity, and of simultaneity 
and succession in time ? The senses do not provide us with these 
ideas. At the threshold, then. Positivism renounces its own primary 
maxim. The principle of causation and the perception of design 
have a genesis which entitles them to not less credit than is given 
to the recognition of likeness and temporal sequence. A Posi- 
tivist, however disposed, with M. Comte, to discard psychology, 

1 This has been shown above, in ch. i. See, also, J. Martineau, A Study of 
Spinoza, p. 233. 



68 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

must admit that there are mental phenomena. He must admit 
that they form together a group having a distinct character. He 
must refer them to a distinct spiritual entity, or to a material 
origin, in which case he lapses into Materialism. 

The law of three successive states, — the religious, the meta- 
physical, and the positive, — which Comte asserted to belong to 
the history of thought, — this law, in the form in which it was pro- 
claimed by Comte, is without foundation in historical fact. BeUef 
in a personal God has coexisted, and does now coexist, in con- 
nection with a belief in second causes, and loyalty to the maxims 
of inductive investigation. 

J. S. Mill, while adhering to the proposition that we know only 
phenomena, attempted to rescue the Positivist scheme from scepti- 
cism, which is its proper corollary, by holding to something exterior 
to us, which is " the permanent possibility of sensations," and by 
speaking of " a thread of consciousness." But matter cannot be 
made a something which produces sensations, without giving up the 
Positivist denial both of causation and of our knowledge of any- 
thing save phenomena. Nor is it possible to speak of a " thread 
of consciousness," if there be nothing in the mind but successive 
states of consciousness. Mr. Mill was bound by a logical necessity 
to deny the existence of anything except mental sensations, — 
phenomena of his own individual consciousness ; or if he over- 
stepped the limit of phenomena, and believed in "a something," 
whether material or mental, he did it at the sacrifice of his funda- 
mental doctrine.^ 

The principal adversaries of Theism at the present day are 
Materialism and Agnosticism. Materialism is the doctrine that 
mind has no existence except as a function of the body : it is a 
product of organization. In its crass form, MateriaHsm affirms 
that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. This 
exploded view involves the notion that thought is a material sub- 
stance contained somehow in the brain. In its more refined state- 
ment, Materialism asserts that thought, feeling, volition, are 
phenomena of the nervous organism, as magnetism is the property 
of the loadstone. Thought is compared to a flame, which first 
burns faintly, then more brightly, then flickers, and at length goes 
out, as the material source of combustion is consumed or dissipated. 
^See remarks of Dr. Flint, Antitheistic Theories, pp. 185, 186. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 69 

Materialism is a theory which was brought forward in very 
ancient times. It is not open to the reproach, nor can it boast of 
the attraction, of novelty. And it deserves to be remarked, that 
the data on which its merit as a theory is to be judged remain 
substantially unaltered. It is a serious though frequent mistake to 
think that modern physiology, in its microscopic examination of 
the brain, has discovered any new clew to the solution of the prob- 
lem of the relation of the brain to the mind. The evidences of 
the close connection and interaction of mind and body, or of 
mental and physical states, are not more numerous or more plain 
now than they have always been. That fatigue dulls the attention, 
that narcotics stimulate or stupefy the powers of thought and emo- 
tion, that fever may produce delirium, and a blow on the head 
may suspend consciousness, are facts with which mankind have 
always been famiHar. The influence of the body on the mind is in 
countless ways manifest. On the contrary, that the physical organ- 
ism is affected by mental states is an equally common experience. 
The feeling of guilt sends the blood to the cheek ; fear makes the 
knees quake ; joy and love brighten the eye ; the will curbs and 
controls the bodily organs, or puts them in motion in obedience to 
its behest. But there is no warrant in the interaction of mind and 
body for the opinion that the latter, or any other extra-mental 
reality, is the cause or the subject of mental cognition. 

Not only are the facts on either side familiar to everybody, but 
no nearer approach has been made toward bridging the gulf 
between physical states — in particular, molecular movements of 
the brain — and consciousness. Says Tyndall, "The passage from 
the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of conscious- 
ness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a defi- 
nite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not 
possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the 
organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning 
from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not 
know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, strength- 
ened, and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very 
molecules of the brain ; were we capable of following their mo- 
tions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there 
be ; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding 
states of thought and feeling, — we should be as far as ever from 
the solution of the problem, How are these physical states con- 



70 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

nected with the facts of consciousness?"^ This is said, be it 
observed, on the supposition of a sweeping psycho-physical paral- 
lehsm between physical and mental states, which is incapable of 
proof. Close as is the relation of the brain and the mind, the 
field is often left in the main to the self-activity of each according 
to its own nature. Not even a MateriaHst, however, doubts that 
there is a class of phenomena which no physical observation is 
capable of revealing. If the brain of Sophocles, when he was 
composing the Antigone, had been laid bare, and the observer 
had possessed an organ of vision capable of discerning every 
movement within it, he would have perceived not the faintest 
trace of the thoughts which enter into that poem, — or of the 
sentiments that inspired the author. One might as well cut open 
a bean-stalk, or search a handful of sand, in the hope of finding 
thought and emotion. 

It is easy to prove, and it has been proved, that Materialism 
regarded as a theory is self-destructive. If opinion is not the 
product of the mind's own self-activity, but is merely a product 
of the molecular motion of nervous substance, on what ground is 
one opinion preferred to another? What is the criterion for the 
judgment? Is not one shuffle of atoms as normal as another? 
if not, by what criterion is one to be approved, and the other 
rejected? How can either be said to be true or false, when both 
are equally necessary, and there is no norm to serve as a touch- 
stone of their validity? It is impossible to pronounce one kind 
of brain normal, and another abnormal ; since the rule on which 
the distinction is to be made is itself a mere product of molecular 
action, and therefore possessed of no independent, objective va- 
lidity. To declare a given doctrine true, and another false, when 
each has the same justification as the rule on which they are 
judged, is a suicidal proceeding. Like absurdities follow the 
assertion by a materialist that one thing is morally right, and an- 
other morally wrong, one thing noble, and another base, one thing 
wise, and another foolish. There is no objective truth, no crite- 
rion having any surer warrant than the objects to which it is 
applied. There is no judge between the parties ; the judge is 
himself a party on trial. Thus Materialism lapses into scepticism. 

"^Fragments of Science, p. I2i; 5th ed., p. 42. Declarations apparently of 
the same purport occur occasionally, — yet, as in Tyndall, inconsistently, — in 
Spencer. See his Psychology, vol. i. §§ 62, 272. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 71 

Physiology is powerless to explain the simple fact of sense-percep- 
tion, or the rudimental feeling at the basis of it. A wave of tenu- 
ous ether strikes on the retina of the eye. The impact of the 
ether induces a molecular motion in the optic nerve, which, in 
turn, produces a corresponding effect in the sensorium lodged in 
the skull. On this condition there ensues 2i feeling; but this feel- 
ing, a moment's reflection will show, is something totally dissimi- 
lar to the wave-motions which preceded and provoked it. But, 
further, in the act of perception the mind attends to the sensation, 
and compares one sensation with another. This discrimination is 
a mental act on which Materialism sheds not the faintest ray of 
light. The facts of memory, of conception, and reasoning, the 
phenomena of conscience, the operations of the will, — of these 
the Materialistic theory can give no reasonable or intelligible 
account. The Materialist is obliged to deny moral freedom. Vol- 
untary action he holds to be necessitated action. The conscious- 
ness of Hberty with the corresponding feelings of self-approbation 
or guilt are stigmatized as delusive. No man could have chosen 
or acted otherwise than in fact he did choose or act, any more 
than he could have added a cubit to his stature. Of the origin 
and persistency of these ideas and convictions of the soul. Mate- 
rialism hopelessly fails to give any rational account. 

Materialism, as it is usually held at present, starts with the fact 
of the simultaneity of thought and molecular changes. This is so 
far exaggerated as to make it inclusive of all mental action. This 
is the doctrine of " psycho-physical parallelism " or " conscious 
automatism." If there were ground for this untenable assumption, 
the task would remain of showing how the former are produced by 
the latter. How do brain-movements produce thought-move- 
ments? If consciousness enters as an effect into the chain of 
molecular motion, then, by the accepted law of conservation and 
correlation, consciousness, in turn, is a cause reacting upon the 
brain. But this conclusion is directly contrary to the Materialistic 
theory, and is accordingly rejected. It will not do to allow that 
force is convertible into consciousness. There must be no break 
in the physical chain. Consciousness is excluded from being a 
link in this chain. Consciousness can subtract no force from 
matter. It will not do to answer that consciousness is the attend- 
ant of the motions of matter. What causes it to attend? What is 
the ground of what parallelism exists between the series of mental 



72 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

and the series of material manifestations ? Is it from the nature of 
matter that both ahke arise ? Then, how can thought be denied 
to be a Hnk in the physical series ? If it be some form of being 
neither material nor mental, the same consequence follows, and all 
the additional difficulties are incurred which belong to the monis- 
tic doctrine of Spinoza. A refuge is sought in the self-contradictory 
notion of " epiphenomena," or concomitants which are not effects 
but which are figuratively designated as shadows of molecular 
action ! There are limits to the interaction of the brain and the 
mind ; there are distinct groups of phenomena ; all mental states, 
including sensations so far as consciousness is involved, have their 
invisible centre and source in the indivisible self. 

Such is the mire into which one falls upon the attempt to 
hold that man is a conscious automaton. It is not escaped by 
imagining matter to be endowed with mystical and marvellous 
capacities, which would make it different from itself, and endue 
it with a heterogeneous nature. Secret potencies, after the man- 
ner of the hylozoist Pantheism of the ancients, are attributed to 
the primeval atoms. " Mind-stuff," or an occult mentality, is 
imagined to reside in the clod, or, to make the idea more attrac- 
tive, in the effulgent sun. The Platonic philosophy is said to lurk 
potentially in its beams. This is fancy, not science. The reality 
of a mental subject, in which the modes of consciousness have their 
unity, is implied in the language of Materialists, even when they 
are advocating their theory. The presence of a personal agent 
by whom thoughts and things are compared, their order of suc- 
cession observed, and their origin investigated, is constantly 
assumed. 

The proposition that the ideas of cause and effect, substance, 
self, etc., which are commonly held to be of subjective origin, are the 
product of sensations, and derived from experience, is disproved 
by the fact that experience is impossible without them. In estab- 
lishing the a priori character of the intuitions, Kant accomplished 
a work which forever excludes Materialism from being the creed 
of any but confused and illogical reasoners. 

Agnosticism, the system of Herbert Spencer, includes disbelief 
in the personality of God, but also equally in the personality of 
man. There is, of course, the verbal admission of a subject and 
object of knowledge. This distinction, it is even said, is " the 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 73 

consciousness of a difference transcending all other differences."^ 
But subject and object, knower and thing known, are pro- 
nounced to be purely phenomenal. The reahty behind them is 
said to be utterly incognizable. Nothing is known of it but its 
bare existence. So, too, we are utterly in the dark as to the rela- 
tions subsisting among things as distinguished from their transfig- 
ured manifestations in consciousness ; for these manifestations 
reveal nothing save the bare existence of objects, together with rela- 
tions between them which are perfectly inscrutable. The phenom- 
ena are symbols, but they are symbols only in the algebraic sense. 
They are not pictures, they are not representations of the objects 
that produce them. They are effects, in consciousness, of un- 
known agencies. The order in which the effects occur suggests, 
we are told, a corresponding order in these agencies. But what 
is "order," what is regularity of succession, when predicted of 
noumena, but words void of meaning ? " What we are conscious 
of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, 
are but subjective affections produced by objective agencies 
which are unknown and unknowable."^ These effects are generi- 
cally classified as matter, motion, and force. These terms express 
certain "likenesses of kind," the most general likenesses, in the 
subjective affections thus produced. There are certain likenesses 
of connection in these effects, which we class as laws. Matter 
and motion, space and time, are reducible to force. But " force " 
only designates the subjective affection in its ultimate or most 
general expression. Of force as an objective reality we know 
nothing. It follows that the same is true of cause, and of every 
other term descriptive of power. There is power, there is cause, 
apart from our feeling ; but as to what they are we are entirely in 
the dark. "The interpretation of all phenomena in terms of mat- 
ter, motion, and force, is nothing more than the reduction of our 
complex symbols of thought to the simplest symbols ; and when 
the equation is brought to its lowest terms, the symbols remain 
symbols still." ^ Further, the world of consciousness and the 
world of things as apprehended in consciousness, are symbols of a 
reality to which both in common are to be attributed. " A 
Power of which the nature remains forever inconceivable, and to 
which no limits in Time or Space can be imagined, works in us 

^ Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 2d ed., i. 157. 

2 Ibid., i. 493. 3 jTirst Principles, 2d ed., p. 558. 



74 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

certain effects." ^ Thus all our science consists in a classification 
of states of consciousness which are the product of the inscrutable 
Cause. It is a " transfigured Realism." Reality, in any other 
sense, is a terra incognita. 

With these views is associated Mr. Spencer's doctrine of evolu- 
tion. Evolution is the method of action of the inscrutable force. 
He is positive in the assertion that " the phenomena of Evolution 
are to be deduced from the Persistence of Force." By this he 
means the " Absolute Force" — "some Cause, which transcends 
our knowledge and conception." It is " an Unconditioned Reality 
without beginning or end."^ But persistence applied to phenome- 
nal forces signifies that these in their totality are quantitatively 
constant. This could not be said of the Absolute Force, the 
Unknown Cause. Yet, it is forces in the phenomenal sense, or the 
conservation of energy, which is made the starting-point of evolu- 
tion. " But the conservation of energy is not a law of change, still 
less a law of qualities," whereas the celestial, organic, social, and 
other phenomena which make up what Mr. Spencer calls cosmic 
evolution, are so many series of qualitative changes.'* " The con- 
servation of energy," as Mr. Ward points out, " does not initiate 
events, and furnishes absolutely no clew to qualitative diversity. 
It is entirely a quantitative law." The confusion in the meaning 
attached to " Persistence of Force " makes shipwreck of the entire 
evolutionary scheme in which this vague and ambiguous phrase 
plays so important a part. 

We can only glance at the steps of the process. Homogeneous 
matter, it is assumed, diversifies or differentiates itself. A passage 
from inorganic being to life is gained only by a leap. The develop- 
ment is represented as going on until nervous organism arises, and 
reaches a certain stage of complexity, when sentience appears, and, 
at length personal consciousness, with all its complexity of contents. 
But consciousness is a growth. All our mental life is woven out 
of sensations. Intuitions are the product of experience, — not of 
the individual merely, but of the race, since the law of heredity 
transmits the acquisitions of the ancestor to his progeny. So mind 
is built up from rudimental sensations. The lowest form of life 
issues at last in the intellect of a Bacon or a Newton. And fife, 
it seems to be held, is evolved from unorganized matter. 

"^ First Principles, p. 557. ^ Ibid., § 147. ^ Ibid., § 62. 

^Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. i. p. 214. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-TMEISTIC THEORIES 75 

What, according to Spencer's own principles, are " matter," and 
" nervous organism," and " life," independently of consciousness 
and when there is no consciousness to apprehend them? How 
can Nature be used to beget consciousness, and consciousness be 
used, in turn, to beget Nature? How are reason, imagination, 
memory, conscience, and the entire stock of mental experiences 
of which a Leibnitz or a Dante is capable, evolved from nerve-sub- 
stance? These and like questions we waive, and direct our atten- 
tion to the doctrine of "the Unknowable." 

What is " the Absolute " and " the Infinite " which are declared 
to be out of the reach of knowledge, and which, the moment the 
knowing faculty attempts to deal with them, lead to manifold con- 
tradictions? They are mere abstractions. They have no other 
than a merely verbal existence. They are reached by thinking 
away all limits, all conditions, all specific qualities. In short, " the 
Absolute " as thus described is nothing. 

The attempt is made to exhibit a synthesis of " the detailed phe- 
nomena of life and mind and society in terms of matter, motion, and 
force." ^ But the " synthesis," like the prior " analysis," confounds 
abstraction with analysis. " Knowledge is to be verified by ruth- 
lessly abstracting from the concrete real all qualitative specifica- 
tions. Celestial bodies, organisms, societies, are to be reduced to 
their lowest terms, viz.. Matter, Motion, Force." What is merely 
" a generalization from the material world " is turned into an instru- 
ment for retracing a path, which is development only in name. In 
this way, the world of things, material and mental, is reconstructed. 
Things are evolved which were not involved. 

If this fictitious Absolute be treated as real, absurdities follow.^ 

^ Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, i. 255 seq. 

2 The antinomies which Kant and Hamilton derive from a quantitative con- 
ception of the Infinite are the result. The antinomies of Kant, and of Hamilton 
and Mansel, are capable of being resolved. They involve fallacies. A quanti- 
tative idea of the Infinite is frequently at the basis of the assertion that con- 
tradictions belong to the conception of it. The Infinite is treated as if it were 
a complete whole, i.e. as if it were a finite. Hamilton's doctrine of nescience 
depends partly on the idea of " the Infinite " and " the Absolute " as mere 
abstractions, and unrelated, and partly on a restricted definition of knowledge. 
We cannot know space, he tells us, as absolutely bounded, or as infinitely un- 
bounded. The first, to be sure, is impossible, because it is contrary to the 
known reality. The second is not impossible. True, we cannot imagine space 
as complete ; we cannot imagine all space, space as a whole, because this, too, is 
contrary to the reality. But we know space as infinite ; that is, we know space 



76 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The Absolute which Spencer actually places at the foundation of 
his system is antithetical to relative being ; it is correlated to the rela- 
tive. Moreover, the Absolute comes within the pale of conscious- 
ness, be the cognition of it however vague. Only so far as we are 
conscious of it, have we any evidence of its reality. Moreover, it 
is the cause of the relative. It is to the agency of the Absolute that 
all states of consciousness are referable. " It works in us.y says 
Spencer, " certain effects." Plainly, the Absolute, the real Abso- 
lute, is related. Only as related in the ways just stated is its exist- 
ence known. Mr. Spencer says himself that the mind must in 
" some dim mode of consciousness posit a non-relative, and in 
some similarly dim mode of consciousness, a relation between it 
and the relative^ ^ 

Plainly, we know not only that the Absolute is, but also, to the 
same extent, ivhat it is. But let us look more narrowly at the 
function assigned to the Absolute, and the mode in which we as- 
certain it. Here Mr. Spencer brings in the principle of cause. 
The Absolute is the cause of both subject and object. And the 
idea of cause we derive, according to his own teaching, from the 
changes of consciousness which imply causation. "The force," 
he says, " by which we ourselves produce changes, and which serves 
to symbolize the cause of changes in general, is the final disclos- 
ure of analysis." ^ In other words, the experience of conscious 
causal agency in ourselves gives us the idea of "force." This is 
*'the original datum of consciousness." This is all we know of 
force. Only as we are ourselves conscious of power, do we know any- 
thing of power in the universe. Now, Mr. Spencer chooses to 
name the ultimate reality " Force " — " the Absolute Force." He 
declares it to be inscrutable ; since the force of which we are 
immediately conscious is not persistent, is a relative. Yet he says 
that he means by it " the persistence of some cause which tran- 
scends our knowledge and conception." Take away cause from 
the Absolute, and nothing is left ; and the only cause of which we 
have any idea is our own conscious activity. If Mr. Spencer would 
make the causal idea, as thus derived, the symbol for the interpre- 
tation of "changes in general" he would be a Theist. By deftly 

and know not only that we cannot limit it, but positively that there is no limit 
to it. We know what power is. We do not lose our notion of power when we 
predicate infinitude of it. It is power still, but power incapable of limit. 
1 Essays, vol. iii. pp. 293 seq. ^ Fir si Principles, p. 169. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 77 

resolving cause into the physical idea of " force," he gives to his 
system a Pantheistic character. It is only by converting the a 
priori idea of cause, as given in consciousness, into a " force " 
which we " cannot form any idea of," and which he has no war- 
rant for assuming, that he avoids Theism.^ 

Let us observe the consequences of holding the Agnostic rigidly 
to his own principles. 

According to Mr. Spencer's numerous and explicit avowals, all 
of our conceptions and language respecting nature are vitiated by 
the same anthropomorphism which he finds in the ascribing of per- 
sonality to God. All science is made out to be a mental picture to 
which there is no hkeness in reahties outside of consciousness. 
To speak of matter as impenetrable, to make statements respecting 
an imponderable ether, molecular movements, atoms, even respect- 
ing space, time, motion, cause, force, is to talk in figures, without 
the least knowledge of the realities denoted by them. It is not a 
case where a symbol is adopted to signify known reality. We 
cannot compare the reality with the symbol or notion, because of 
the reality we have not the slightest knowledge. When we speak, 
for example, of the vibrations of the air, we have not the least 

^ Later expressions of Mr. Spencer indicate a nascent disposition to cross 
the limit of bald phenomenalism and to concede that the " Infinite and Eternal 
Energy," from which all things proceed, " is not, as far as our knowledge is 
concerned, an absolute blank." " In the development of religion," he says, " the 
last stage reached is recognition of the truth that force as it exists beyond 
consciousness, cannot be like what we know as force within consciousness, and 
that yet, as either is capable of generating the other, they must be different 
modes of the same. . . . Consequently . . . the Power manifested throughout 
the world distinguished as material, is the same Power which in ourselves 
wells up under the form of consciousness." " We are thus led," it is added, 
"to rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic interpretation of the universe." 
But in the context these qualifications of absolute neutrality between the two 
hypotheses, and from absolute ignorance of the nature of the primal Energy, 
are studiously guarded. See Spencer's Principles of Sociology (1896), vol. iii. 
P- I73> §§ 659, 660. Mr. John Fiske goes, perhaps, farther in the right direc- 
tion than Mr. Spencer. He believes that " the Infinite Power which is mani- 
fested in the universe is essentially psychical in its nature, that between God 
and the Human Soul there is a real kinship, although we may be unable to 
render any scientific account of it." Through Nature to God, p. 162. He 
protests against attempts " to take away from our notion of God the human 
element " (p. 166). Yet he fails to justify explicitly in our conception the 
elements which are essential in real personality and warrant us in containing 
in it, for substance, the truth that He hears and answers prayer. 



y8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

knowledge either of what the air is, or of what vibrations are. We 
are merely giving name to an unknown cause of mental states ; but 
even of cause itself, predicated of the object in itself, and of what 
is meant by its agency in giving rise to effects in us, we are as igno- 
rant as a blind man of colors. Mr. Spencer says that matter is 
probably composed of ultimate, homogeneous units.-^ He appears 
in various places, to think well of the atomic theory of matter. 
But if he is speaking of matter as it is, independently of our sensa- 
tions, he forgets, when he talks thus, the fundamental doctrine of 
his philosophy. He undertakes to tell us about realities, when he 
cannot consistently speak of aught but their algebraic symbols, or 
the phenomena of consciousness. The atomic theory of matter 
carries us as far into the unknown realm of ontology as the doc- 
trine of the personality of the Absolute, or any other proposition 
embraced in Christian Theism. 

It is obvious that Agnosticism is the destruction of science. All 
the investigations and reasonings of science proceed on the founda- 
tion of axioms, — call them intuitions, rational postulates, or by 
any other name. But these, according to Agnostics, denote simply 
a certain stage at which the process of evolution has arrived. 
What is to hinder them from vanishing, or resolving themselves 
into another set of axioms, with the forward movement of this 
unresting process? What then will become of the doctrines of 
Agnosticism itself ? It is plain that on this philosophy, all knowl- 
edge of realities, as distinct from transitory impressions, is a house 
built on the sand. All science is reduced to Schein — mere sem- 
blance. 

It is impossible for the Agnostic to limit his knowledge to 
experience, and to reject as unverified the implications of experi- 
ence, without abandoning nearly all that he holds true. If he 
sticks to his principle, his creed will be a short one. Conscious- 
ness is confined to the present moment. I am conscious of 
remembering an experience in the past. This consciousness as a 
present fact I cannot deny without a contradiction. But how do 
I know that the object of the recollection — be it a thought, or 
feeling, or experience of any sort — ever had a reahty ? How do I 
know anything past, or that there is a past ? Now, memory is 
necessary to the comparison of sensations, to reasoning, to our 
whole mental life. Yet to believe in memory is to transcend 

'^Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 157. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 79 

experience. I have certain sensations which I attribute collectively 
to a cause named my " body." Like sensations lead me to recog- 
nize the existence of other bodies like my own. But how do I 
know that there is consciousness within these bodies? How do I 
know that my fellow-men whom I see about me have minds like 
my own? The senses cannot perceive the intelHgence of the 
friends about me. I infer that they are intelligent, but in this 
inference I transcend experience. Experience reduced to its 
exact terms, according to the methods of Agnosticism, is confined 
to the present feeling, — the feeling of the transient moment. 
When the Agnostic goes beyond this, when he infers that what is 
remembered was once presented in consciousness, that his fellow- 
men are thinking beings, and not mindless puppets, that any intel- 
ligent beings exist outside of himself, he transcends experience. 
If he were to predicate intelligence of God, he would be guilty of no 
graver assumption than when he ascribes intelligence to the fellow- 
men whom he sees moving about, and with whom he is conversing. 
The Spencerian identification of subject and object, mind and 
matter, is illusive and groundless. They are declared to be " the 
subjective and objective faces of the same thing." They are 
said to be " the opposite faces " of one reality. Sometimes they 
are spoken of as its " inner and outer side." On the one side, 
we are told, there are nerve-waves ; on the other there are feel- 
ings. What is the fact, or the reality, of which these two are 
"faces" or "sides"? From much of the language which Mr. 
Spencer uses — it might be said, from the general drift of his 
remarks — the impression would be gained, that the reality is 
material, and that feeling is the mere concomitant or effect. But 
this theorem he disavows. He even says, that, as between ideal- 
ism and materialism, the former is to be preferred.^ More, he 
tells us, can be alleged for it than for the opposite theory. The 
nerve-movement is phenomenal not less than the feeling. The 
two are coordinate. The fact or the reality is to be distinguished 
from both. As phenomena, there are two. There are two facts, 
and these two are the only realities accessible to us. The sup- 
posed power, or thing in itself, is behind, and is absolutely hidden. 
The difference between the ego and the non-ego " transcends all 
other differences." A unit of motion and a unit of feeling have 
nothing in common. 

^ Ibid., vol. i. p. 159. 



80 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

"Belief in the reality of self," it is confessed by Mr. Spencer, is 
" a belief which no hypothesis enables us to escape." ^ It is im- 
possible, he proceeds to argue, that the impressions and ideas 
*' which constitute consciousness " can be thought to be the only 
existences ; this is *' really unthinkable." If there is an impres- 
sion, there is " something impressed." The sceptic must hold 
that the ideas and impressions into which he has decomposed 
consciousness are /us ideas and impressions. Moreover, if he has 
an impression of his personal existence, why reject this impres- 
sion alone as unreal? The belief in one's personal existence, Mr. 
Spencer assures us, is "unavoidable"; it is indorsed by "the 
assent of mankind at large " ; it is indorsed, too, by the " suicide 
of the sceptical argument against it." Yet the surprising decla- 
ration is added, that " reason rejects " this belief. Reason rejects 
a behef which it is impossible to abandon, and against which the 
adverse reasoning of the doubter shatters itself in pieces. On 
what ground is this strange conclusion reached? Why, "the 
cognition of self," it is asserted, is negatived by the laws of 
thought. The condition of thought is the antithesis of subject 
and object. Hence the mental act in which self is known implies 
"a perceiving subject and a perceived object." If it is the true 
self that thinks, what other self can it be that is thought of? If 
subject and object are one and the same, thought is annihilated. 

If the two factors of consciousness, the ego and the non-ego, are 
irreducible, the reality of self is the natural inference. The " un- 
avoidable " belief that self is a reahty is still further confirmed by 
the absolute impossibiHty of thinking without attributing the act 
to self. 

But let us look at the psychological difficulty which moves Mr. 
Spencer instantly to lay down his arms, and surrender an "un- 
avoidable " belief. In every mental act there is an impHcit con- 
sciousness of self, whether the object is a thing external or a 
mental affection. From this cognition of self there is no escape. 
Suppose, now, that self is the direct object. To know is to. dis- 
tinguish an object from other things, and from the knowing sub- 
ject. When self is the object, this distinguishing activity is exerted 
by the subject, while the object is self, distinguished alike from 
other things and from the distinguishing subject. The subject 
distinguishes, the object differs in being distinguished or dis- 
1 Jnrsi Principles, 4th ed., p. 66. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 8 1 

cerned. Yet both subject and object, notwithstanding this formal 
distinction, are known in consciousness as identical. If, again, 
self as the subject of this activity is made the object, then it is to 
one form of activity, distinguished in thought from the agent, that 
attention is directed, while at the same time there is a conscious- 
ness that the distinction of the agent from the power or function 
is in thought merely, not in reality. That self-consciousness is a 
fact, every one can convince himself by looking within. No psy- 
chological objection, were it much more specious than the one just 
noticed, could avail against an experience of the fact. We are 
fortunately not called upon by logic to part with an " unavoida- 
ble " belief.^ 

To explain the complex operations of the intellect as due to a 
combination of units of sensation is a task sufficiently arduous. 
But, when it comes to the will and the moral feelings, the difficul- 
ties increase. The illusive idea of freedom, as was explained above, 
is supposed by Mr. Spencer to spring from the supposition that 
" the ego is something more than the aggregate of feelings and 
ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists," — exists at the 
moment of action. The mistake is made of thinking that the ego 
is anything but " the entire group of psychical states which con- 
stituted the action " supposed to be free.^ Yet the same writer 
elsewhere, and with truth, asserts that this idea of the ego is 
" verbally intelligible, but really unthinkable." ^ 

Mr. Spencer's system has been correctly described by Mansel 
as a union of the Positivist doctrine, that we know only the 
relations of phenomena, with the Pantheist assumption of the 
name of God to denote the Substance or Power which Hes beyond 
phenomena.'* The doctrine, which is so essential in the system, 
that mental phenomena emerge from nervous organism when it 
reaches a certain point of development, is Materialistic. Motion, 
heat, light, chemical affinity, Mr. Spencer holds, are transformable 
into sensation, emotion, thought. He holds that no idea or feeling 

1 This objection of Spencer is a part of Herbart's system. It is confuted by 
Ulrici, Gott u. der Mensch^ pp. 321, 322. 

2 Principles of Psychology, vol, i. pp. 500, 501. 
' First Principles, 4th ed., p. 66. 

* The Philosophy of the Conditioned, '^, ^o. "The truth is that this new 
philosophy owes its monism to the a priori speculations of Spinoza, while its 
agnosticism is borrowed from Hume and Hume's successors." Ward, Nat- 
uralism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. p. 20S. 
G 



82 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

arises save as a result of some physical force expended in produc- 
ing it. " How this metamorphosis takes place ; how a force 
existing as motion, heat, or light, can become a mode of conscious- 
ness ; how it is possible for the forces liberated by chemical 
changes in the brain to give rise to emotion, — these are mysteries 
which it is impossible to fathom." ^ They are mysteries which 
ought to shake the writer's faith in the assumed fact which creates 
them. If forces Hberated by chemical action produce thought, 
then thought, by the law of conservation, must exert the force 
thus absorbed by it. This makes thought a link in the chain of 
causes, giving to it an agency which the theory denies it to pos- 
sess. If chemical action does not " give rise to " thought, by 
producing it, then it can only be an occasional cause, and the 
efficient cause of thought is left untold. This evolution of mind 
from matter as the prius, even though matter be defined as a mode 
of " the Unknowable," and the subjection of mental phenomena 
to material laws, stamp the system as essentially Materialistic. 
" The strict mechanical necessity of the physical side is upheld, 
and, as a consequence the spontaneity and purposiveness of the 
psychical side is declared to be illusory, a thing to be explained 
away." ^ The arguments which confute materialism are applicable 

to it. 

Underneath modern discussions on the grounds of religious 
belief is the fundamental question as to the reahty of human 
knowledge. The doctrine of the relativity of knowledge has been 
made one of the chief props of scepticism and atheism. If the 
proposition that knowledge is relative, simply means that we can 
know only through the organ of knowledge, it is a truism. We 
can know nothing of the universe as a whole, or of anything in it, 
beyond what the knowing agent by its constitution is capable of 
discerning. The important question is, whether things are known 
as they are, or whether they undergo a metamorphosis, converting 
them into things unhke themselves, by being brought into contact 
with the perceiving and thinking subject. It is tantamount to the 
question whether our mental constitution is, or is not, an instru- 
ment for perceiving truth. The idealist would explain all the 
objects of knowledge as modifications of the thinking subject. 
Knowledge is thus made an inward process, having no real coun- 

1 First Principles, 2d ed., p. 217. 

2 For the modification of Spencer's opinion, see Appendix, Note 6. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 83 

terpart in a world without. Nothing is known, nothing exists, 
beyond this internal process. Others, who stop short of Idealism, 
attribute to the mind such a transforming work upon the objects 
furnished it, or acting upon it from without, that their nature is 
veiled from discovery. The mirror of consciousness is so made 
that things reflected in it may, for aught we can say, lose all 
resemblance to things in themselves. That which is true of sense- 
perception, at least as regards the secondary qualities, color, 
flavor, etc., — which are proximately affections of man's physical 
organism, — is assumed to be true of all things and of their relations. 
This is a denial of the reality of knowledge in the sense in which 
the terms are taken by the common sense of mankind. The 
doctrine was propounded in the maxim of the Sophist, Protagoras, 
that " man is the measure of all things." ^ 

Locke made sensation the ultimate source of knowledge. 
Berkeley withstood materialism by making sensations to be 
affections of the spirit, ideas impressed by the will of God, acting 
by uniform rule. Hume, from the premises of Locke, resolved 
our knowledge into sensations, which combine in certain orders of 
sequence, through custom, of which no explanation is to be given. 
Customary association gives rise to the delusive notion of neces- 
sary ideas, — such as cause and effect, substance, power, the ego^ 
etc. Reid, through the doctrine of common sense, rescued 
rational intuitions and human knowledge, which is built on them, 
from the gulf of scepticism. There is another source of knowledge, 
a subjective source, possessed of a self- verifying authority. Kant 
performed a like service by demonstrating that space and time, 
and the ideas of cause, substance, etc., the concepts or categories of 
the understanding, are not the product of sense-perception. They 
are necessary and universal ; not the product, but the condition, 
of sense-perception. They are presupposed in our perceptions 
and judgments. Moreover, Kant showed that there are ideas of 
reason. The mind is impelled to unify the concepts of the under- 
standing by which it conceives, classifies, and connects the objects 
of knowledge. These ideas are of the world as a totality, embrac- 
ing all phenomena, the ego or personal subject, and God, the 
unconditioned ground of all possible existences. 

But Kant founded a scepticism of a peculiar sort. Space, time, 
and the categories, cause, substance, and the like, he made to be 
purely subjective, characteristics of the thinker, and not of the 

1 See Appendix, Note 7. 



84 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

thing. They reveal to us, not things in themselves, but rather 
the hidden mechanism of thought. Of the thing itself, the object 
of perception, we only know its existence. Even this we cannot 
affirm of the ego^ which is not presented in sense-perception. The 
same exclusively subjective validity belongs to the other ideas of 
reason. They signify a tentative effort which is never complete. 
They designate a nisus which is never realized. Since the con- 
cepts of the understanding are rules for forming and ordering the 
materials furnished in sense-perception, they cannot be applied to 
anything supersensible. The attempt to do so lands us in logical 
contradictions, or antinomies, which is an additional proof that we 
are guilty of an illegitimate procedure. 

From the consequences of this organized scepticism, the nat- 
ural as well as actual outcome of which was the systems of Pan- 
theistic Idealism, Kant delivered himself by his doctrine of the 
Practical Reason. He called attention to another department of 
our nature. We are conscious of a moral law, an imperative man- 
date, distinguished from the desires, and elevated above them. 
This implies, and compels us to acknowledge, the freedom of the 
will, and our own personality which is involved in it. Knowing 
that we are made for morahty, and also for happiness, or that these 
are the ends toward which the constitution of our nature points, 
we must assume that there is a God by whose government these 
ends are made to meet, and are reconciled in a future life. God, 
free-will, and immortality are thus verified to us on practical 
grounds. Religion is the recognition of the moral law as a divine 
command. Religion and ethics are thus identified. Love, the 
contents of the law, is ignored, or retreats into the background. 
Rectitude in its abstract quality, or as an imperative mandate, is 
the sum of virtue. 

The doctrine of the relativity of knowledge is presented by Sir 
William Hamilton in a form somewhat different from the Kantian 
theory. The Infinite and the Absolute — existence uncondition- 
ally unhmited, and existence unconditionally limited — are neither 
of them conceivable. For example, we cannot conceive of infinite 
space, or of space so small that it cannot be divided \ we cannot 
conceive of infinite increase or infinite division. Positive thought 
is of things Hmited or conditioned. The object is limited by its 
contrast with other things and by its relation to the subject. Only 
as thus limited can it be an object of knowledge. The object in 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 85 

sense-perception is a phenomenon of the non-ego ; the non-ego is 
a reality, but is not known as it is in itself. Thought is shut up be- 
tween two inaccessible extremes. But although each is incon- 
ceivable, yet, since they are contradictories, one or the other must 
be accepted. For example, space must be either infinite, or 
bounded by ultimate limits. An essential point in Hamilton's 
doctrine is the distinction between conception and belief. The 
two are not coextensive. That may be an object of belief which 
is not a concept. This distinction is elucidated by Mansel, who 
says, " We may believe that a thing is, without being able to con- 
ceive how it is." " I believe in an infinite God ; i.e. I believe 
that God is infinite. I believe that the attributes which I ascribe 
to God exist in him in an infinite degree. Now, to believe this 
proposition, I must be conscious of its meaning ; but I am not 
therefore conscious of the infinite God as an object of concep- 
tion ; for this would require, further, an apprehension of the man- 
ner in which these infinite attributes coexist so as to form one 
object." ^ But in this case do I not know the meaning of " infi- 
nite"? Does it not signify more than the absence of imagi7iable 
limit, a mere negation of power in me? Does it not include the 
positive idea, that there is no limit ? In the case of opposite in- 
conceivables, extraneous considerations, according to Hamilton, 
determine which ought to be believed. Both necessity and free- 
dom are inconceivable, since one involves an endless series, the 
other a new commencement; but moral feeling — self-approba- 
tion, remorse, the consciousness of obHgation — oblige us to be- 
lieve in freedom, although we cannot conceive of it as possible. 
The fact is an object of thought, and so far intelligible, but not 
the quo modo. This dilemma in which we are placed, where we 
have to choose between two contradictory inconceivables, does 
not imply that our reason is false, but that it is weak, or limited 
in its range. When we attempt to conceive of the Infinite and 
the Absolute, we wade beyond our depth. They are terms signi- 
fying, not thought, but the negation of thought. Our behef in the 
existence of God and in his perfection rests on the suggestions 
and demands of our moral nature. In this general view Hamilton 
was in accord with Kant. Mr. Mansel differed from Sir William 
Hamilton in holding that we have an intuition of the ego as an 
entity, and in holding that the idea of cause is a positive notion, 
1 The Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 127, 129; cf. pp. 18 seq. 



86 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

and not a mere inability to conceive of a new beginning, or of an 
addition to the sum of existence. But Mr. Mansel applied the 
doctrine of relativity to our knowledge of God, which was thus 
made to be only anthropopathic, approximative, symbolic; and 
he founded our belief in God ultimately on conscience and 
the emotions.^ 

Under the auspices of James Mill, and of his son John Stuart 
Mill, the philosophical speculations of Hume were revived. Intui- 
tions are affirmed to be empirical in their origin. They are im- 
pressions, which through the medium of sense-perception, and 
under the laws of association, stamp themselves upon us in early 
childhood, and thus wear the semblance of a priori ideas. But 
this is only a semblance. There are, possibly, regions in the uni- 
verse where two and two make five. Causation is nothing but 
uniformity of sequence. The Positivist theory of J. S. Mill led 
him to the conclusion that matter is only " the permanent possi- 
bility of sensations " ; but all these groups of possibilities which 
constitute matter are states of the ego. And Mill was only pre- 
vented from concluding that the mind is nothing but a bundle of 
sensations by the intractable facts of memory. On his view of 
mind and matter, it is impossible to see how a man can know the 
existence of anybody but himself. He says that he does "not 
believe that the real externality to us of anything except other 
minds is capable of proof." But as we become acquainted with 
the existence of other minds only as we perceive their bodies, 
and since this perception must be held to be, hke all our percep- 
tions of matter, only a group of sensations, we have no proof that 
such bodies exist. 

The Agnostic scheme of Herbert Spencer accords with the the- 
ory of Hume and Mill in tracing intuitions to an empirical source. 
But the experience which gives them being is not that of the indi- 
vidual, but of the race. Heredity fiirnishes the clew to the solu- 
tion of the problem of their emergence in the consciousness of 
the individual. He inherits the acquisitions of remote ancestors. 
Then the notion of energy is superadded to the Positivist creed. 
With it comes the postulate of a primal Power, of which we are 
said to have an indefinite consciousness, or "the Unknowable," 
— the Pantheistic tenet grafted on Positivism. The doctrine of 
the relativity of knowledge is taken up from Hamilton and Man- 
1 Respecting Matthew Arnold's conception of God, see Appendix, Note 8. 



THE PRINCIPAL ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES 8/ 

sel as the ground of nescience respecting realities as distinct from 
phenomena, and respecting God. The facts of conscience which 
have furnished to Kant and Hamilton, and to deep-thinking phi- 
losophers generally who have advocated the relativity of knowl- 
edge, a foundation for belief in free-will and for faith in God, 
meet with no adequate recognition. Little account is made of 
moral feeUng, and its necessary postulates are discarded as 
fictions. 

Our knowledge of God is knowledge and not an illusive sem- 
blance of knowledge. It is not meant that our knowledge is 
commensurate with the object — the infinite and absolute Being. 
The question of Zophar, " Canst thou by searching find out 
God?" is explained by what immediately follows, "Canst thou 
find out the Almighty to perfection?" Knowledge may be very 
limited, yet real as far as it goes. But it is not even meant that 
the present forms of our knowledge of God correspond Hterally to 
the reality. With the expansion of knowledge, the symbols that 
now express it may be modified, may even be superseded. What 
is meant, in opposition to Agnosticism, is that they are substan- 
tially true. In them the reality is bodied forth up to the measure 
of our finite capacity at this stage of our existence. This position is 
at a world-wide remove from that sort of Agnosticism — that spe- 
cies of phenomenalism — which can be called knowledge only by 
an utter perversion of the ordinary understanding of the word. 

A very acute critic of Mr. Spencer, speaking of his use of the 
distinction of appearance and reality, a " distinction which has ever 
been the stronghold of Agnosticism," and of his confining strict 
knowledge to " appearances behind which God remains wholly 
and forever concealed as Inscrutable ReaHty," writes thus: "We 
have allowed that strict knowing, if it is to mean the resolution of 
the course of Nature into coexistence and succession, and these 
again into a world-formula in terms of matter and motion, does 
not reveal God at all, or mind of any sort. . . . But if we de- 
cline to call anything an appearance, unless it is either perceived 
or perceptible, why then should we attach to it the bad sense of 
concealing, rather than the good sense of revealing? Why should 
appearances not be reality? How can reality appear, shine forth, 
and yet remain totally and forever beyond the knowledge of those 
to whom it appears? Let us turn, as we have done before, to 



88 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the case we know best — the communication of one human mind 
with another. Assuming good faith, we never regard a man's acts 
and utterances as masking, but rather as manifesting the man. If 
they mask when it is his intention to deceive, surely they cannot 
also mask when his intentions are the precise opposite. These 
acts and utterances may be beyond the comprehension of men on 
a lower intellectual level, and with narrower horizons, but they are 
not the less real and true on that account. And why should we 
argue differently, when reflection leads us to see in a universe de- 
clared to be ' everywhere alive ' the manifestations of a Supreme 
Mind?"i 

The rescue of philosophy from its aberrations must begin in a 
full and consistent recognition of the reality of knowledge. Intui- 
tions are the counterpart of realities. The categories are objec- 
tive ; they are modes of existence as well as modes of knowledge. 
Distinct as mind and nature are, there is such an affinity in the 
constitution of both, and such an adaptation of each to each, that 
knowledge is not a bare product of subjective activity, but a reflex 
of reality. Dependent existences imply independent self-existent 
Being. The postulate of all causal connection discerned among 
finite things is the First Cause. From the will we derive our 
notion of causation. Among dependent existences the will is the 
only fountain of power of which we have any experience. It is 
reasonable to believe that the First Cause is a Will. The First 
Cause is disclosed as personal in conscience, to which our wills 
are subject. The law as an imperative impulse to free action 
and as a preappointed end implies that the First Cause is Personal. 
Order and design in the world without — not found there merely, 
but instinctively sought there — corroborate the evidence of God, 
whose being is implied in our self-consciousness, and whose holy 
authority is manifest in conscience. 

^ Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism^ vol. ii. p. 275. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY EVINCED IN ITS ADAPTEDNESS 
TO THE DEEPEST NECESSITIES OF MAN 

Every religion has to undergo a practical test. It verifies or 
disproves itself in the degree in which it answers to the spiritual 
nature and wants of man. Christianity does not come forward as 
a new philosophy having for its primary end the solving of specu- 
lative problems. It professes, to be sure, to be in accord with 
reason. It claims to rest upon a truly rational conception of the 
universal system of which man is a component part. But it also 
founds its title to confidence on more practical grounds. It ap- 
peals immediately to the conscience and the affections. It calls 
for a rectification of the will. It promises to minister to necessi- 
ties of human nature which pertain in common to men of the 
most exalted intelligence and to minds of the humblest cast. In 
its adaptedness to such deep-felt necessities, which spring out of 
man's constitution and condition, which cleave to him as a finite, 
moral, responsible being who looks forward to death, and, with 
more or less of hope or of dread, to a hfe hereafter — in this 
adaptedness lies a proof of its truth and supernatural parent- 
age. If Christianity is found to be matched to human nature as 
no other system can pretend to be, and as cannot be accounted 
for by any wisdom of which man of himself is capable, then we 
are justified in referring it to God as its author. In the propor- 
tion in which this fitness of Christianity to the constitution, the 
cravings, the distress, of the soul, to man's highest and holiest as- 
pirations, becomes a matter of Hving experience, the force of the 
argument will be appreciated. It will be understood in the de- 
gree in which it is felt. Here the data of the inference are 
drawn from experiences of the heart. The impressions which 
carry one to this conclusion are contingent on the state of the 
sensibihty, the activity and health of conscience, and the bent of 
the will. The conclusion itself is one to which the soul advances 

89 



90 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

spontaneously ; one in which, rational though it be, the affections 
and the will are the determining factors. 

There is in the human spirit a profound need of God. This 
grows out of the fact that we are not only finite, but consciously 
finite, and not sufficient for ourselves. But, whether the source of 
it is reflected on or not, this need of a connection with the 
Eternal and Divine is felt. In reality, the hunger for God, 
whether it be consciously recognized or not, is deeper in the 
heart than any other want of human nature; for example, than 
the instinct that craves friendship, or that impels to the creation 
of domestic ties, or that inspires a thirst for knowledge. The need 
of God may be, it often is, latent, undefined. It stirs in the soul 
below the clear light of consciousness. Its very vagueness has the 
effect to send man off in pursuit of a variety of finite objects, which 
are sought for the sake of fiUing the void, the true significance of 
which is not yet discerned. Now it is wealth, now it is honor and 
fame and power, now it is the acquisitions of science. Or it may 
be sensual pleasure, or the entertainment afforded by social inter- 
course, or any one of myriad sorts of diversion. The different 
sorts of earthly good, when worthy of esteem, are estimated be- 
yond the value which experience finds in them. When they are 
gained, disappointment ensues. The void within is not filled. 
If these remarks are commonplace, their very triteness demon- 
strates their truth. In childhood, we find the world into which 
life is opening sufficient. We do not tire of its novelty. The 
future stretches before us with a seemingly infinite attraction. 
The charm of mystery is spread over it. The scene captivates by 
its variety. In the human beings about us, in the spectacles pre- 
sented for the eye to gaze on, in the work and in the play that 
await us at each day's dawn, there is enough. It is only in excep- 
tional instances, in the case of unusually thoughtful and deep-souled 
children, that there appears a sacred discontent with the things 
that are comprised in the hfe about them. When we emerge out 
of immaturity, there will arise within us a sense of the unsatisfacto- 
riness of existence — a feeling not in the least cynical, not always, 
certainly, due to disappointments, though experiences of hardship 
and bereavement, or of whatever makes the heart ache, do cer- 
tainly aggravate the discontent of the soul. It may be that there 
will coexist an inexpressible feeling of loneliness. There is a 
reaching out for something larger than human love can provide, 



ADAPTEDNESS TO HUMAN NECESSITIES 9 1 

and for something which human love, when tasted to the full, 
leaves unsupplied. Study, travel, absorption in pleasant labor, 
experiments in quest of happiness from this or that source, much 
as they may do to drive away temporarily the feeling of want, fail 
to pacify it permanently. A thirst, slaked for the day, revives on 
the morrow. There is a cry in the soul, even if not so articulate 
as to be distincdy heard by the soul itself, to which the world 
makes no response. Gifted minds which of set purpose shut their 
ears to this voice within have their moments in which they cannot 
avoid hearing it. Goethe is one of the most prominent examples 
of the deliberate purpose to confine the attention within the finite 
realm, and to live upon the delights of art, literature, science, love. 
Whatever could disturb the repose of the spirit, the dark side of 
mortal experience, harassing questions respecting the future, he 
would banish from thought. Yet this serene man said to his 
friend : "I have ever been esteemed one of fortune's chiefest favor- 
ites ; nor can I complain of the course my life has taken. Yet, 
truly, there has been nothing but toil and care ; and in my sev- 
enty-fifth year I may say that I have never had four weeks of gen- 
uine pleasure. The stone was ever to be rolled up anew."^ Rest 
was not attained. There was a lurking sense that the peace which 
came and went had no perennial source. " We may lean for a 
while," he once said, " on our brothers and friends, be amused by 
acquaintances, rendered happy by those we love ; but in the end 
man is always driven back upon himself. And it seems as if the 
divinity had so placed himself in relation to man as not always to 
respond to his reverence, trust, and love ; at least in the terrible 
viotnent of need'' " There had then been," writes Mr. Hutton, 
in his thoughtful Essay on Goethe, " there had then been a 
time when the easy familiarity with which the young man scruti- 
nized the universe had been exchanged for the humble glance of 
the heart-stricken child ; and he had shrunk away from that time 
(as he did from every hour of life when pain would have probed 
to the very bottom the secrets of his nature), to take refuge in the 
exercise of a faculty which would have been far stronger and purer, 
had it never helped him to evade those awful pauses in existence 
when alone the depths of our personal life lie bare before the in- 
ward eye, and we start to see both ' whither we are going, and 
whence we came.' Goethe deliberately turned his back upon 
^ Eckermann, Conversatio7is of Goethe^ p. 76. 



92 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

those inroads which sin and death make into our natural habits 
and routine. From the pleading griefs, from the challenging guilt, 
from the warning shadows, of his own past life, he turned reso- 
lutely away, like his own Faust, to the alleviating occupations of 
the present. Inch by inch he contested the inroads of age upon 
his existence, striving to banish the images of new graves from his 
thoughts long before his nature had ceased to quiver with the 
shock of parting ; never seemingly for a moment led by grief to take 
conscious refuge in the love of God and his hopes of a hereafter." ^ 

It is sometimes made a reproach to Christianity that it is a 
refuge of the weak, the disappointed, the desponding. But a 
full proportion of its disciples have been won from the ranks of 
men of even marked virility. But the question is whether the 
realities of existence are not best discerned from the point of 
view gained by those who have experience of pain — whether the 
mental vision of such is not clearer. 

Not long after the death of his wife, Thomas Carlyle wrote to 
his friend, Erskine of Linlathen, as follows : — 

"'Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy 
kingdom come, thy will be done,' — what else can we say ? The other 
night, in my sleepless tossings about, which were growing more and 
more miserable, these words, that brief and grand prayer, came strangely 
into my mind, with an altogether new emphasis, as if written and shin- 
ing for me in mild pure splendor on the black bosom of the night 
there ; when I, as it were, read them, word by word, with a sudden 
check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of composure 
that was most unexpected. Not perhaps for thirty or forty years had 
I ever formally repeated that prayer ; nay, I never felt before how in- 
tensely the voice of man's soul it is, — the inmost aspiration of all that is 
high and pious in poor human nature ; right worthy to be recommended 
with an, ' After this manner pray ye.' " 

The just criticism of Goethe brings us to another deep feehng 
of the human soul, — a more solemn experience, a more imperi- 
ous need. The yearning of the finite soul for an infinite good 
is not its most agonizing emotion. The craving which an intelli- 
gent creature, however pure, would feel, — the craving for an 
object commensurate with its boundless desires, — is far from 
comprising the whole need of man. A self-accusation, more- 
over, sooner or later, with more or less persistency, haunts the 

1 Hutton's Essays, vol. ii. {Literary), p. 77. 



ADAPTEDNESS TO HUMAN NECESSITIES 93 

soul. It may exist only as an uneasy suspicion. It will fre- 
quently arise in connection with special instances of wrong-doing, 
or of neglect of duty in relation to other men. One finds himself 
reproached within for being selfish in his conduct. The con- 
sciousness of secret purposes which his moral sense condemns 
inspires him with a feeling of unworthiness and of shame. He 
falls below his own ideals ; he detects in himself a lack of courage, 
of truth, of purity, of magnanimity, of loyalty to the just claims 
of relatives, or of neighbors, or of society at large. Epochs are 
reached in the course of life when, as he glances backward over a 
long period, cherished habits of feeling rise in memory to con- 
demn him. Self-accusation may go so far as to induce self-loath- 
ing. The more he probes his own character, the more aware does 
he become that there is something perverse at the very core. 
He is living to the world, is making the good which the world 
yields, or self-gratification in a more gross or more refined form, 
the goal and end of his striving. Not only is he without God, he 
is alienated from him ; and in this ahenation, carrying in it an 
idolatry of the creature and of finite good, he discerns the root of 
the evil that is in him. Then the sense of guilt attaches itself to 
the impiety or ungodliness out of which, as an innermost fountain, 
flows a defiled stream of ethical misconduct. We are drawing 
no fancy picture. The sense of unworthiness is not a morbid 
experience. It is not confined to transient moods ; it is not 
limited to characters of exceptional depravity ; it does not belong 
alone to men of the spiritual elevation of Pascal and Luther, 
of Augustine and Edwards ; it does not pertain to one nation 
exclusively, or to any single branch of the human family ; it is 
not an artificial product of the teaching of Christianity, or of any 
other of the rehgions that have prevailed on the earth. It is a 
human experience, giving, therefore, the most diversified mani- 
festations of its presence in the confessions of individuals, in 
poetry, and in other forms of literature, in penances, sacrifices, 
and other rites of worship. The " whole world is guilty before 
God," and in varying degrees sensible of the fact, despite the 
obtuseness of conscience which the practice of evil-doing engen- 
ders, the natural efforts to stifle so humiliating and painful an 
emotion, the partially successful devices to divert the attention 
from it, and the sophistry which labors to make it seem unreal.^ 
1 On this subject, see Appendix, Note 9. 



94 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Then the sense of being without God is converted into a sense 
of estrangement from Him. The feehng of responsibleness for 
sin, while it brings God more vividly to mind, awakens the con- 
sciousness of being excluded from communion with Him. The 
sense of condemnation drives one away from God, and yet com- 
pels the thought of Him. The soul hides itself " among the 
trees of the garden," yet is followed, and held, and mysteriously 
attracted by the offended Being from whom it has chosen to 
separate itself. 

Besides a sense of unworthiness there is a consciousness of 
bondage. It may be that particular habits, which the will has 
suffered to gain control, have now come to be felt as a chain. 
Sensual appetite in one form or another, vanity, ungovern- 
able resentment, covetousness, or some other base purpose or 
corrupt form of conduct — may have established a mastery, which, 
when the conviction of guilt arises, and with it discontent, is felt 
as a galHng tyranny. If there be no single predominant passion, 
the general principle of worldliness which has enthroned the crea- 
ture in the place of the Creator oppresses the soul that has now 
awoke to a perception of its culpable and abnormal state. Strug- 
gles to break loose from the yoke of habit — which has become 
bound up with the laws of association that determine the current 
of thought, has enslaved the affections, and taken captive the will 
— prove ineffectual. "What I would, that do I not; but what I 
hate, that do I " ; or, as the heathen poet expresses it, — 

" Video meliora proboque ; 
Deteriora sequor." 

Of course the struggle against inward evil may be weak, but in 
strong and earnest natures it may amount to an agony. The 
insurrection against the power to which the will has yielded itself 
may rend the soul as a kingdom is torn by civil strife. The 
unaided effort at self-emancipation turns out to be fruitless. It is 
the vain struggle of Laocoon in the coils of the serpent. It may 
end in a despairing submission to the enemy. 

But this description does not complete the account of the experi- 
ence of the soul in its relations to God, as long as it is yet practi- 
cally ignorant of the gospel. The misery of human life must be 
taken into consideration. Where there is youth, health, prosperity, 
and the buoyancy of spirits which is natural under these circum- 



ADAPTEDNESS TO HUMAN NECESSITIES 95 

Stances, there is commonly but a slight appreciation of the count- 
less forms of distress from which even the most favored class of 
mankind do not escape. It is possible, to be sure, to understate 
the amount of happiness in the world of mankind. That there is 
no sunshine in human life, even in situations that are adverse, 
only a cynic would be disposed to deny. But he is equally blind 
to facts who fails to recognize that the earthly life of men is a 
scene which abounds in trouble, in pain of body and anguish of 
spirit, in hearts lacerated by fellow-beings who have been loved and 
trusted, made sore by bereavement, anxious with numberless cares, 
often weary or half-weary with the burden of toil and the bitter- 
ness of grief. Then there approaches every household and every 
individual the dark shadow of death. The love of life is an instinct 
so strong that only in exceptional cases is it fully overborne by 
the pressure of despondency. Yet death stands waiting. More 
than half of the race expire in infancy. Before every individual 
is the prospect of this inevitable event, which he endeavors to 
avert and to postpone as long as possible, all the while, however, 
aware that his painstaking will at length be fruitless. The feeHngs 
sketched above are not peculiar to any single generation. They 
are not the result, as they are sometimes said to be, of a gloom 
engendered by Christian teaching. He who imagines that life of 
old was nothing but sunshine, has forgotten his Homer and a thou- 
sand pathetic laments strewn through the noblest literature of 
antiquity. 

None but the superstitious consider that pain and affliction are 
distributed in strict proportion to transgression, and that the hap- 
piest lot falls uniformly to the least unworthy. But, while this 
notion is abandoned as a falsehood of superstition, we may recog- 
nize in it the distortion of a truth which is embedded in the con- 
victions of mankind, — the truth that natural evil and moral evil 
are connected in the system of things ; that one is the concomitant 
and shadow of the other ; that suffering, to a large extent, to 
say the least, is a part of a retributive order. Certain it is, that 
pain and sorrow tend to provoke self-judgment and that feeling of 
ill-desert which is inseparable from conscious impiety and self- 
ishness. The presage of judgment arises spontaneously in the 
soul. Especially the prospect of death is apt to excite remorseful 
apprehension. The vivid presentiment of retribution to come, or 
an undefined dread of this nature, springs up unbidden in the 



96 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

mind, in the presence of that solemn crisis which breaks up our 
present form of being, and sends the spirit out of its fleshly tene- 
ment into the world beyond. To a mind haunted by reproaches 
of conscience, death itself wears a penal aspect ; it is felt to be 
something incongruous, a violent rupture of a bond, which, if dis- 
solved at all, we might look to see loosened by a gentler process, 
by a transition not attended with the pangs of dissolution. 

When the moral and spiritual perceptions have thus been 
quickened, the mind is struck with the fact that Christianity, as set 
forth in the Scriptures, recognizes to the full extent all the facts 
which it has been aroused to discern. Not only are they admitted 
in the Scriptures, and spread out with no attempt to disguise 
them : they are insisted on, and are set forth with a starthng im- 
pressiveness. An individual thus awakened to the realities of exist- 
ence finds depicted there man's need of God, — his thirst for 
God, — and the futility of seeking to slake the thirst of the soul for 
the Infinite from any earthly fountains of pleasure. " Why do ye 
spend money for that which is not bread ? " What is unworthy in 
human character and conduct he finds proclaimed there with a 
piercing emphasis. There is no extenuation of human guilt, 
whether as connected with immorality or with ungodliness. Every 
disguise is stripped off. The actual condition of men, as regards 
the sufferings to which all are exposed, and those from which none 
escape, is very often referred to and is everywhere latently assumed. 
Death is held up to view as the goal which all are approaching. The 
real source of the " sting of death " is brought out. The forebod- 
ing of conscience, the product of the sense of ill desert, is dis- 
tinctly sanctioned in a solemn affirmation of coming judgment. In 
short, the malady of the soul, in all its characteristic features, is laid 
bare in a way to evoke and intensify the spiritual needs and fears 
which have been adverted to. This outspokenness of the Bible, 
this unmasking of the evil and of the danger, invites confidence. 
The diagnosis is unsparing. It suggests at least the hope that 
where the disorder is so fully understood, an adequate remedy 
will not be wanting. 

The need of the soul is Reconciliation. This is the first want 
of which it is conscious. It needs to be brought near to God, 
and into personal communion with Him, through Forgiveness. It 
needs, moreover, help from without, that it may subdue the prin- 
ciple of sin and attain the freedom of a willing loyalty. It needs 



ADAPTEDNESS TO HUMAN NECESSITIES 97 

deliverance from death, as far as death is an object of dread either 
in itself or for what is feared in connection with it. 

How can one who is in this mood fail to be deeply impressed at 
the outset by the circumstance, that, while the Scriptures assert 
without palliation the guilt of sin and the righteous displeasure of 
God on account of it, they at the same time announce, not an 
inevitable perdition, but a complete rescue? There is a procla- 
mation of " good tidings." First, there is the momentous an- 
nouncement of a merciful Approach made by God to the race 
of mankind. This simple declaration, apart from methods and 
details, will excite a profound interest. The initiative in the work 
of deliverance has been taken by Him from whom alone forgive- 
ness and deliverance can proceed. Then comes the expHcit an- 
nouncement of a mission of a Saviour. There is a manifestation 
of God to men through a man ; a man, yet in such an intimacy 
of union to God, that his most fit designation is " the Son of God," 
— a union such that no one knows the Father but the Son, and 
whoever has seen him may be said to have seen the Father, — a 
union the mysterious springs of which precede his hfe among 
men. He brings a proclamation of the pardon of sin. The 
fatherliness of God, never absolutely withdrawn by Him who is 
" kind to the evil and the unthankful," is brought into the fore- 
ground. Ill-desert is to be no barrier to the coming back of the 
estranged to the Father's house and heart. Death need no longer 
be an object of dismal foreboding. It is converted into a door- 
way to an immortal life hereafter. All this is said by the divine 
Messenger. But the redemption thus declared is represented as 
achieved by him. A man among men, born of woman, subject 
like ourselves to temptation, absolutely identifying himself with 
his race in sympathy, not less than with the condemnation felt by 
God for the sin of mankind, he makes a free, absolute surrender 
of his own will to the Father's will, with every new access of trial 
raises this surrender to a higher pitch, carries human nature vic- 
toriously through life, and through the anguish of an undeserved 
death, — the final test of loyalty to God and of devotion to men, 
willingly endured because it is a cup given him of the Father 
to drink. In that death is the life of the world. Here is the 
response of Christianity to the call of the conscience and heart 
for an Atonement for sin. Through death the Saviour rises to a 
consummated hfe, invisible, — to the vantage-ground whence to ex- 

H 



98 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

tend his life-giving power to draw men to himself and to make 
them partakers of his own perfection, to begin now and to be fully 
reaUzed hereafter. 

Jesus came to plant within the soul a life of filial union to God. 
In the assured confidence and peace of that life there would be a 
conscious superiority to the world, an independence of the changes 
and chances of this mortal state. In that life of heavenly trust, 
fears and anxieties of an earthly nature would lose their power to 
break the calm of the spirit. There would inhere in it a power to 
overcome the world. Resentful passions would die out in the rec- 
ollection of the heavenly Father's patience and forgiving love, and 
in the sense of the inestimable worth and the possibility of perfec- 
tion that belong to every soul, however unworthy. A secret life, 
serene in the midst of sorrow and danger, a perennial fountain of 
rest, and stimulus to kindly and beneficent exertion, — such was 
the gift of Christ to men. " My peace I give unto you." This 
life he first realized in himself. He maintained and perfected it 
through conflict. He imparts it through the channel of personal 
union and fellowship.^ Christian serenity leaves room for the full 
flow and warmth of all human sympathies and aff"ections. The 
follower of Christ is empowered to use the world without abusing 
it, or being enslaved to it. He is not obliged to fling away the 
good gifts of God ; but, by making them servants instead of mas- 
ters, he can enjoy, and yet can forego, that which he possesses. 
He carries within him a treasure sufficient when all else is lost. 

How shall this adaptedness in Christianity to man's spiritual 
being be accounted for? Can it be attributed to the Nazarene 
and to the group of fishermen who followed him, they being 
credited with no more than a merely human insight? Is 
there not reason to conclude that a higher than human agency, 
even a divine wisdom and will, was active in this great movement? 
Leaving out of view other kinds of proof, as that from testimony 
to miracles, the practical argument for the supernatural origin of 
Christianity, from its proving itself the counterpart of human need 
and the satisfaction of the soul's highest aspirations, is one difficult 
to controvert. It is of a piece with the response of the man 
born bhnd, who replied to the objections of the Pharisees, 
" Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not : one thing I know, 
that, whereas I was blind, now I see," ^ 

1 As set forth in that classic, The Imitation of Christ. ^ John ix. 25. 



CHAPTER V 

THE DIVINE MISSION OF JESUS ATTESTED BY THE TRANSFORMING 
AGENCY OF CHRISTIANITY IN HUMAN SOCIETY 

In the preceding chapter we have touched on the adaptedness 
of Christianity to minister to the needs and yearnings of the in- 
dividual. We have now to glance at the power and beneficence 
of Christianity as evinced in the broader field of history. 

Not the supernatural origin of a religion, nor even its truth, can 
be decided by the number of its adherents : else Buddhism, with 
its four hundred and fifty millions, would hold the vantage-ground 
over against Christianity with its four hundred millions ; and Mo- 
hammedanism, with its one hundred and seventy-five milHons, 
might put in a plausible claim to a higher than human derivation. 
It is necessary to consider in what way the converts of a religion 
have been won. Mohammedanism was a fanatical crusade against 
idolatry, that achieved its success by the sword and by the fierce 
energy with which it was wielded. Force was exerted, to some 
extent, for the spread of Christianity by the successors of Constan- 
tine ; and force has been exerted in other instances, like that of 
the conquest of the Saxons by Charlemagne : yet there is no 
doubt that coercion — which, it may be observed, was used in the 
cause of Buddhism by the kings who embraced it — has, on the 
whole, hindered, instead of helped on, the progress of the gospel. 
The victory of the religion of the cross in the Roman Empire 
was really gained by moral means. The reactionary movement 
of Julian proved futile, for the reason that the faith which it at- 
tempted to succor was in a moribund state. When we consider the 
small beginnings of Christianity, in its Galilean birthplace, and 
watch its progress against the organized and violent opposition of 
Judaism, and the successive attempts to extirpate it made by im- 
perial Rome, from the cruelties of Nero and Domitian to the sys- 
tematic persecution by Diocletian, its triumph over the ancient 
heathenism excites a wonder that is not lessened by theories which 

99 
LcFC. 



lOO THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

have been invented to explain it. All the proximate causes of 
the downfall and disappearance of the Graeco-Roman religion, 
through the preaching of the gospel, presuppose behind them, as 
the ultimate cause, the personal influence of Jesus Christ and his 
life and death. When we see the same gospel, amid the ruins of 
the Roman Empire, subduing to itself the victorious barbarian 
tribes by whom it was overthrown, we get a new impression of 
the mysterious efficacy that resides in it. An Asiatic religion in 
its origin, it became the religion of Europe. Yet its adaptedness 
to races beyond the limits of the Aryan peoples has likewise been 
fully demonstrated. 

But in order to complete the argument for the truth and divine 
origin of Christianity, drawn from its effect, we must go farther, 
and investigate the particular character of that effect. The impres- 
sion which the spread of the other religions — whether the national 
faiths, like the native religions of China, or the universal systems, 
Mohammedanism and Buddhism — might leave upon us is largely 
neutrahzed when we mark the character and limit of the influence 
exerted by them on human nature, culture, and civilization. We 
may, to be sure, recognize enough of good to prove that those 
religions inculcated important truths. We may discern a value 
in the moral and rehgious sentiments which they partially express 
and respond to. But the idea that any of those religions is the 
absolute religion, or the religion revealed from Heaven to be 
the perpetual light of men, is dispelled the moment we find that 
the work wrought by them upon the human soul is one-sided and 
defective, and that their final result is an arrested development. 
The individual is impelled forward to a certain limit. There he 
halts. Even deterioration may ensue. The nation feels a trans- 
forming agency for a time, but at length it reaches an impassable 
barrier. An imperfect civilization becomes petrified. Christian- 
ity, on the contrary, never appears to have exhausted its power. 
It moves in advance, and beckons forward the individual and the 
people who embrace it. When it is misconceived in some respect, 
and a partly perverted development ensues, it frequently develops 
a rectifying power. It forever instigates to reform : its only goal 
is perfection. 

We are not to forget that gradualness in the transforming 
effect of the Gospel is the character attributed by Jesus himself 
to its progress and influence in the world. It was to be first the 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY 1 01 

blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.^ It was to grow- 
as the seed of the mustard plant.^ It was to operate in the heart 
of society, on its institutions, habits, and sentiments, hke the yeast 
hidden in the "measures of meal." ^ 

Moreover, the consequence of this nature of the gospel — of 
what seems a slow conquest and spread, of the imperfect discern- 
ment of its meaning, and the moral defects of its disciples — was 
foreseen and predicted.^ It is to be remembered that their sins as 
individuals, and especially crimes committed, even such as cruel 
persecution of fellow-Christians, are chargeable not to real Christi- 
anity, but to misconceptions of it. 

We are not to forget, of course, that Christendom is something 
besides a religion. It is composed of particular races — races hav- 
ing distinctive traits which have entered as one factor into the 
spiritual life and the civihzation of this society of peoples. They 
have inherited from the past, especially from the Roman Empire 
and the cultivated nations of antiquity, invaluable elements of polity 
and culture. The Teutonic peoples were specially hospitable to the 
religion of the gospel. They were docile, as well as virile. They 
had these native traits to begin with : they received much, besides 
the gift of Christian faith, from those whom they conquered. Yet it 
is Christianity which leavened all. It is Christianity which fused, 
moulded, trained, the European nations. It is in the light of 
Christianity that their vigorous life unfolded itself. In that light 
it still flourishes. 

Jesus Christ brought into the world a new ideal of man — man 
individual and man social. This was not all. Had this been all, 
the condition of men might not have been materially altered. He 
brought in at the same time a force adequate to effect — though 
not magically, but by slow degrees — the realization of this ideal. 
It is in its double character — in the perfection of the moral ideal, 
and in the wonderful stimulus to the practical realization of it — 
that the transcendent superiority of the Christian rehgion is mani- 
fest. The sages of antiquity presented high though always imper- 
fect conceptions of what man and society should be ; but those 
conceptions remained inoperative. They did not avail for the 
elevation of many individuals even. Their effect on social and 
political life was small. Culture was attained by the intellectual 
and versatile Greek, but the ideal of manhood was faulty. Truth- 
1 Mark iv. 28. 2 Matt. xiii. 32. ^ JUd.^ 33. * Jbid.^ 34 seq. 



102 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

fulness, " the gold of character," was not one of his characteristic 
virtues. There was no life-giving force to save the Greek from 
degeneracy and corruption. No more was there a saving power 
in the law and polity which Rome created. Neither Greek learn- 
ing and philosophy, nor Roman politics and jurisprudence, could 
rescue mankind from degradation, or even keep up what power 
they had exerted. 

With Christ there came in a nobler ideal and a force to lift men 
up to it. That force resided in Jesus himself. The central thought 
of Jesus was religion — man's relation to God. Take out this idea 
of man's true life as consisting in that filial relation to the heavenly 
Father, and the vital principle is lost from the system of Jesus. 
The sources of its power are dried up : the root is dead, and the 
branches wither away. 

For with this idea is inseparably connected his estimate of the 
worth of the soul. Every individual, according to the teaching of 
Christ, has an incalculable worth. This does not depend on his 
outward condition. Lazarus, the beggar at the gate, was on a 
footing of equality with Dives at his luxurious table. To the sur- 
prise of the disciples, Jesus conversed with a peasant woman at 
a well. What was a woman, and a poor woman, even a depraved 
woman, that the Master should waste time iii order to enlighten 
her ? Little children he took in his arms when the disciples " for- 
bade them." It was not the will of the Father that one of these 
little ones should perish. The transgressor of human and divine 
law, the male or female outcast — he saw in each something of 
imperishable value. With this idea of the worth of man, there is 
associated the recognition of every individual as an end in himself. 
No man is made merely to enhance the interests, or minister to 
the gratification, of another man. " Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself r He is the greatest who has most of the spirit of 
self-sacrifice. For one man to use another man or a woman as an 
instrument of his own pleasure or advancement, is an act of incon- 
ceivable cruelty and baseness. The equality of men as regards 
worth or value, be their talents, property, station, power, or con- 
dition in any particular what they may, is a cardinal truth. It is 
a deduction from their common relation, as creatures and children, 
to God, and from the common benefit of redemption, in which all 
alike share. In the community of God's children there was no 
distinction of bondman or freeman, rich or poor, male or female, 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY 103 

Greek or barbarian. All — be their nationality that of the strong 
and intellectual branches of mankind, or of those little esteemed ; 
be their lot among the prosperous or the unfortunate — are on a 
level. They are " brethren." 

The Christian ideal embraced the sanctification of the entire life. 
It did not subvert established relations between man and man, as 
far as they were conformed to nature and right. It infused into 
them a new spirit. It set to work not to pull down, but to purify, 
the family and the state, and to raise each of these institutions to 
the ideal standard. Each was to be led to fulfil its true function, 
and to become a fountain of the highest possible beneficence. 

One of the great changes which Christianity made, and is mak- 
ing, in the family, is the abolition of domestic tyranny. The 
authority of the father in ancient Rome, as in many other nations, 
was without hmit. As far as restraints of law were concerned, he 
was a despot in the household. He had over its members the 
right to inflict death. From the time of the introduction of Chris- 
tianity, the authority of the father began to be reduced. In the 
second century the paternal prerogative, the patria protestas, 
was curtailed in the Roman law. The Stoic ethical teaching 
contributed to this result, as to other humane reforms. How far 
milder sentiments that were shared by the Stoics in the early 
Christian centuries were unconsciously imbibed from the gospel, 
which was already active in modifying the atmosphere of thought 
and feeling, is a question difficult to settle. This is certain, that 
Christian teaching from the beginning tended strongly to such a 
result, and evidently, at a later date, had a powerful effect. The 
more Christianity gained influence, the position of the wife in rela- 
tion to the husband's will and control was wholly changed for the 
better. The freedom of divorce which existed by Roman law and 
custom met in the precepts of Christ and in the teaching of the 
Church a stern rebuke. The wife could no longer be discarded in 
obedience to the husband's caprice. Marriage became a sacred 
bond — a bond, except for one cause, indissoluble. Of the im- 
measurable influence which the religion of Jesus has exerted in 
shielding the purity of woman, it is needless to speak. The power 
which the unsparing injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount have 
exercised for the defence of the helpless and innocent against law- 
less passion, it would be impossible to estimate. As fast as Chris- 
tianity spread, respect for the rights of woman extended. The 



104 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

more deeply Christianity leavens society, the more does all unjust 
discrimination in laws and social customs, by which their rights and 
privileges have been abridged, disappear. The words of Jesus on 
the cross, when he committed his mother to the care of John, 
have inspired in all subsequent ages a tender feeling for the 
sorrows of woman. If reverence for the Virgin was at length 
exaggerated, and became a hurtful superstition, that unauthorized 
worship was connected with a sentiment toward the wife and 
mother which genuine Christianity fosters. 

The State is the second great institution having a divine sanction, 
and springing out of essential tendencies and needs of human 
nature. It is one of the most remarkable features of Christianity, 
and one of the marked signs that a wisdom higher than that of 
man was concerned in it, that from the first it asserted the inviola- 
ble authority of the civil magistracy. There was all the temptation 
that religious zeal could afford, to cast off the rule of the State. 
This temptation was aggravated a thousand-fold by the circum- 
stance that against the early Christians the civil powers arrayed 
themselves in mortal antipathy. Yet from the beginning the 
injunction was to honor the ruler. Nay, he was declared to be the 
minister of God for the execution of justice. Civil government 
was affirmed to be a part and instrument of God's moral govern- 
ment of mankind. Christians were to pray for the ruler at the 
very time when Nero was burning them alive. No priestly usur- 
pation in later periods, when it was carried to its height, was ever 
able to extirpate in the Christian mind the feeling of obligation 
to obey the magistrate, and the conviction that the powers that be 
are ordained of God. Christianity exalted justice, and revered the 
State as its divinely appointed upholder between man and man. 
Christianity honored rightful authority, and recognized it as com- 
mitted to the rulers of a pohtical community. 

At the same time, the religion of Christ brought in liberty. 
Wherever it has been understood aright, it has been the most 
powerful champion and safeguard of natural and pohtical rights. 
In heathen antiquity the State was supreme, and practically om- 
nipotent. The individual was absorbed in the political body of 
which he was a member. To that body he owed unlimited alle- 
giance. There was no higher law than the behest of the State. 
Socrates is one instance of an individual refusing, out of deference 
to the Divine Will, to obey a prohibition of the State. He would 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY 105 

not promise to refrain from teaching when he might have saved his 
life by doing so. We meet here and there with a shining example 
of one who was ready to disregard a civil mandate which required 
of him some flagrant act of injustice. But these are exceptions 
that prove the rule. They are anticipations of a better era than 
existed, or could exist, as long as polytheism was dominant, and 
while there was no broader form of social unity than the civil com- 
munity. Christianity founded a new kingdom. It was a kingdom 
not of this world ; but it was a real sovereignty, which was felt to 
be supreme over all human enactments. The first preachers of 
the gospel felt obliged to obey God rather than man. The early 
Christians had to disobey the laws and decrees of the Jewish and 
the Roman authorities. It was a new thing when prisoners who 
were brought before Roman prefects, and commanded to worship 
the image of the emperor or to curse Christ, refused, and persist- 
ently refused, to do so. Such contumacy, such insubordination, 
struck these administrators of law as a marvel of audacity and of 
treasonable hostility to the supreme authority. By this means, 
through that higher allegiance to the revealed will of God, which 
Christianity made a widespread, practical fact, the power of the 
State, up to that time virtually boundless, was cut down to reason- 
able proportions. The precepts of the State were subjected to the 
private judgment of the subject. The individual decided whether 
or not they were consistent with the laws of the King of kings. 
He inquired whether they enjoined what God ha^ forbidden, or 
forbade what God had enjoined. The eternal laws of justice and 
right, of which Sophocles wrote in the highest strain of Greek 
religious thought, became, in the Christian Church, the everyday, 
absolute arbiter of conduct. There might spring up a new despot- 
ism. There might grow up an ecclesiastical authority not less 
tyrannical than the State had been. But this could only be a tem- 
porary abuse and perversion. Christian truth could not be perma- 
nently eclipsed. Meantime, even in the days when ecclesiastical 
control over the individual was overgrown, it still afforded a most 
wholesome check to the unrestrained power of chieftains and kings. 
The Papacy, in the periods when it mistakenly strove to govern the 
laity with a supreme sway, and even to build up a universal mon- 
archy of its own, a spiritual despotism, did, nevertheless, do a vast 
service in its unceasing assertion of a spiritual law above the will 
of any man, however strong, and of the right of spiritual ideas to 



I06 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

prevail over brute force. Guizot, speaking of the period which en- 
sued upon the fall of the Western Empire, says, " Had the Christian 
Church not existed, the whole world must have been abandoned 
to purely material force." ^ When Christianity had liberated the 
human mind from the yoke of secular power, it proved itself en- 
lightened enough and strong enough to emancipate it from the 
yoke of the ecclesiastical institution through which, in great part, 
that deliverance had been achieved. 

Looking at the constitution of the State itself, we see plainly how 
Christianity has introduced, and tends to introduce, a just meas- 
ure of pohtical liberty, and a fair distribution of political power. 
The constitution of the Church as its Founder estabUshed it, the 
fraternal equality of its members, the mutual respect for opinion 
and preference which was enjoined, the forbidding of a lordship 
like that which existed in secular society — all tended strongly to 
bring analogous ideas and parallel relations into the civil commu- 
nity. Liberty was prized by the ancients ; but what sort of lib- 
erty? At Athens, the citizens were but a handful compared with 
the entire population. In Rome, citizenship was a privilege jeal- 
ously guarded by the select possessors of it. When, at last, polit- 
ical equality was attained, it was through the absolute rule of the 
emperors, after liberty had vanished. Christianity presents no 
abstract pattern of civil society. It prescribes no such doctrine 
as that of universal suffrage. But Christianity, by the respect 
which it pays to man as man, by its antipathy to unjust or artifi- 
cial distinctions, by its whole genius and spirit, favors those forms 
of polity in which all men of competent intelligence, who have a 
stake in the well-being of the community, are allowed to have 
some voice in its government. So far, Christianity is not a neu- 
tral in the contests relative to political rights and privileges. As 
concerns natural rights, which are always to be carefully distin- 
guished from political, the religion of Christ continually protests 
against every violation of justice in the laws and institutions of 
society. The Golden Rule it holds to be not less applicable to 
those acts of the community which determine the relations of its 
members to one another than to the private intercourse of individ- 
uals. Who that examines the governments of Christian nations 
to-day can fail to see what a mighty influence Christianity has 

^ Lectures on the History of Civilization^ ch. ii. p. 38. 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY 10/ 

already exerted in moulding civil society into a conformity with 
human rights and with the rational conception of equahty? 

Christianity fundamentally alters the view which is taken of in- 
ternational relations. Slowly, but steadily, it makes mankind feel 
that injustice is not less base when exercised between nation and 
nation than between man and man. Prior to the Christian era, 
the more closely the members of a tribe or people were bound 
together, the more regardless they generally were of the rights 
and the welfare of all beyond their borders. Pretexts were easily 
found — very often they were not even sought — for enterprises 
of conquest and pillage. As intercourse increased, and commerce 
spread, there was required some mutual recognition of rights. 
Covenants were made, and sometimes were kept. Occasional 
glimpses of a better order of things, in which mankind should be 
regarded as a kind of confederacy, were gained by Stoic philos- 
ophers. Such ideas were now and then thrown out by rhetorical 
writers on politics and morals, like Cicero. But international law 
existed only in its rudiments. Selfishness was the practical rule 
of national conduct. The strong domineered over the weak. 
Christianity subordinated even patriotism to the law of righteous- 
ness and human brotherhood. It insisted on the responsibility of 
the nation, in its corporate capacity, to God, the Father of all. 
It held up a nobler ideal for the regulation of nations in their 
mutual intercourse. It need not be said how much remains to be 
done in order that the Christian law should be even approximately 
carried out. Yet the contrast between the Christendom of to-day 
and the spectacle presented by the tribes and nations of antiquity 
is hke the contrast between winter and spring. In the middle 
ages, the Church, as an organized body, through the clergy, under- 
took to pacify contention, and curb the appetite for aggression. 
Vast good was accomplished, but a new species of tyranny incident- 
ally came in. In modern days, equitable treaties, amicable nego- 
tiations, and, above all, arbitration, are resorted to more and more, 
for the settlement of disputes, the redress of wrongs, and the pre- 
vention of war. Ambition and greed do not avail to expel from 
thought the ideal of the gospel. If clouded for a while, it reap- 
pears in its full effulgence. Christianity does not absolutely for- 
bid war, as it does not prohibit, but rather approves, the use of 
force for the maintenance of law within the limits of each commu- 
nity. But against all wars of aggression, against all wars which 



I08 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

might have been avoided by forbearance and reasonable conces- 
sion, the rehgion of Jesus Hfts up a warning voice, which is more 
and more heard. A glance at the history of Christianity, and at 
the present condition of the world, makes it manifest that a mighty 
force is incessantly at work in the bosom of mankind, which prom- 
ises at last to bring in an era when righteousness shall prevail in 
the dealings of the nations with one another, and men shall learn 
war no more. 

The work which Christianity has done in the cause of charity, 
of kindness and beneficence, constitutes a topic of extreme inter- 
est. There was charity before the gospel. Men were never 
brutes. There was compassion ; there was a recognized duty of 
hospitality to strangers. Among the Greeks, Jupiter was the 
protector of strangers and suppliants. There were not absolutely 
wanting combined efforts in doing good. Institutions of charity 
have not been entirely unknown in heathen nations. In China 
there have long existed, in the different provinces, hospitals for 
two classes, — for old people and for foundlings. In ancient 
times men were not indisposed to befriend their own countrymen. 
This was preeminently true of the Jews. Among the heathen, in 
various towns of the Roman Empire, physicians were appointed 
by the municipality, whose business it was to wait on the poor 
as well as on the rich. Yet, when all this is justly considered, the 
fact remains, that charity was comparatively an unmeaning word 
until Christianity appeared. Largesses bestowed on the multitude 
by emperors and demagogues were from other motives than a 
desire to relieve distress. Considerations of policy had a large 
part in such benefactions as those of Nerva and Trajan for poor 
children and orphans. Nothing effectual was done to check the 
crime of infanticide, which had the sanction of philosophers of 
highest repute. The rescue of foundlings was often the infliction 
upon them, especially upon the females, of a lot worse than death. 
Gladiatorial fights — the pastime which spread over the Roman 
Empire in its flourishing days, and against which hardly a voice 
was ever raised — could not fail to harden the spectators, who 
learned to feast their eyes on the sight of human agony. 

From the beginning, the outflow of charity was natural to 
Christians. God had so loved the world, that he gave His Son. 
Christ loved men, and gave himself for them. The Christian 
principle was love, and love was expressed in giving liberally to 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TR.VNSFORM SOCIETY 109 

those in need. The disciples at Jerusalem were so generous in 
their gifts to the poor of their number, that they are said to have 
" had all things in common " ; although other passages in the Acts 
prove that there was no actual communism, and Christianity never 
impugned in the least the rights of property. Wherever a church 
was established, there were abundant offerings regularly made for 
the poor, systematic provisions for the care of the sick, of orphans, 
and of all other classes who required aid. Gifts were poured out, 
even for the help of Christians in distant places, without stint. 
In the second and third centuries there were scattered all over 
the Roman world these Christian societies, whose members were 
bound together as one family, each taking pleasure in relieving 
the wants of every other. Through their bishops and other offi- 
cers, there was a systematic alms-giving on a scale for which no 
precedent had ever before existed. Nor was it indiscriminate, or 
in a way to encourage idleness, as it too often was, even when the 
motive was laudable, in the middle ages. There is an exhortation 
of the Apostle Paul, in which the spirit of the gospel, as it actually 
embodied itself in the early Church, is impressively indicated. 
" Let him that stole steal no more ; but rather let him labor, 
working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have 
to give to him that needeth." ^ There were reclaimed thieves in 
the church at Ephesus. The apostle urges them to industry in 
order that they may have the means of aiding those in want. 
Nothing could better set before us the influence of the new 
religion. The Apostolic Constitutions, which disclose the rules 
followed among the churches as early as the Nicene age, ordain 
that the poor man shall be assisted, not according to his expecta- 
tions, but in proportion to his real needs, of which the bishops 
and deacons are to judge ; and to be assisted in such a way as 
best to secure his temporal and spiritual good.^ It is added, 
"God hates the lazy." The exercise of discrimination, and of 
care not to foster idleness, is a frequent theme of exhortation 
during several centuries. In one of the earliest post-apostolic 
writings, the Didachg, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles^ the 
Christian disciple is cautioned to keep his money in his hands until 

^ Ephesians iv. 28. 

2 Const. Apost., iv. 5, iii. 4, 12-14. See Chastel's The Charity of the Primi- 
tive Churches, p. 79. 

* Ch. i. 6 (see, also, i. 5). 



no THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

he makes them " sweat." Asylums for orphans, hospitals for the 
sick, sprang into being under the auspices of the Church. In 
process of time nosco?fiia, or hospitals for the diseased, including 
the insane, were founded in all the principal cities, and even 
in smaller towns, and in some country places. Nor did the vast 
stream of benefaction flow out for the help of Christians alone. 
When pests broke out, as at Alexandria in the third century, and 
somewhat earlier at Carthage, the Christians, under the lead of their 
clergy, instead of forsaking the victims of disease, or driving them 
from their houses, as the heathen did, showed their courage and 
compassion by personally ministering to them. The parable of 
the Good Samaritan had not been uttered in vain. Among the 
numerous recorded examples of charity to the heathen is the act of 
Atticus, Archbishop of Constantinople (a.d. 406-426), who, during 
a famine in Nicea, sent three hundred pieces of gold to the pres- 
byter Calliopius. This almoner was directed to distribute it among 
the suffering who were ashamed to beg, without distinction of 
faith. Acacius, Bishop of Amida, about a.d. 420, persuaded his 
clergy to sell the gold and silver vessels of the church, that he 
might ransom several thousands of suffering Persian captives who 
had been taken by the Romans. On one occasion Chrysostom, 
passing through the streets of Antioch, on his way to the cathe- 
dral, saw a multitude of poor, distressed persons. He read to his 
audience the xvith chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians. 
Then he described the blind, the crippled, and diseased throng 
which he had just seen, and proceeded to exhort his hearers to 
exercise toward their " brothers " the compassion which they 
themselves had need of at the hands of God.^ " Christian 
charity extended over all the surface of the empire, like a vast 
tissue of benevolence. There was no city, no hamlet, which, with 
its church and its priest, had not its treasure for the poor ; no 
desert which had not its hospitable convent for travellers. The 
compassion of the Church was open to all."^ 

These meagre references to the charitable work of the early 
Church may call to mind the miracle that Christianity wrought in 
penetrating the human heart with a spirit of kindness, the like to 
which the world before had never known. That same spirit, not 
always discreetly it may be, has been operative among Christian 
nations ever since. It is ever detecting forms of human want and 

^ Opp.i vol. iii. pp. 248 seq. See Chastel, p. 159. ^ Chastel, p. 304. 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TRANSFORM SOCIEIT III 

infirmity which have not been previously noticed, and devising for 
them relief. No superior prudence in administering charity, derived 
from social and economic science, could have ever called into being, 
nor can it ever dispense with, that temper of unselfish pity and love 
out of which the charities of Christian people, age after age, have 
continued to flow. In this feature of beneficence, the Christendom 
of to-day, contrasted with heathen society of any age, is like a gar- 
den full of fruits and flowers by the side of a desert. 

Christianity is the only known corrective of the evils out of 
which socialism arises. The enrichment of the few, and the im- 
poverishing of the many, can be remedied by no infraction of the 
right of property, which would bring back barbarism. .The only 
antidote is to be found in that spirit of beneficence which prompted 
Zaccheus to give half of his goods to feed the poor. That spirit, 
when it prevails, will dictate such arrangements between capitalist 
and laborer as will secure to the latter a fair return for his toil. It 
will check the vast accumulation of wealth in a few individuals. 
And the Christian spirit, as in ancient days, wiU inspire patience 
and contentment, and a better than an earthly hope, in the minds 
of the class whose lot in life is hard. 

In speaking of the improvement of society through the agency 
of Christianity, it is natural for us to think of the two great scourges 
of mankind, — war and slavery. Iniquitous wars are undertaken 
in modem days. Yet, if we compare the motives that lead to 
warfare now with those which in ancient times filled the world with 
incessant strife, we cannot but perceive, much as remains to be 
accomplished, a vast and salutary change. The laws and usages 
of war have felt the humanizing touch of the gospel. The manner 
in which non-combatants are treated is a signal illustration. Once 
they were at the mercy of the conqueror, who too often knew no 
mercy. Their lives were forfeited. Reduction to slavery was a 
mitigation of the penalty which it was lawful to inflict on them. 
A miHtary commander who should treat his prisoners as com- 
manders like Julius Caesar, who were thought in their time to be 
humane, treated them, would be an object of universal execration. 
A like change has taken place, even as regards the property of a 
conquered belligerent. The extinction of a nationality like Poland, 
even when arguments in favor of it are not wholly destitute of weight, 
is a dark blot on the reputation of the sovereigns or nations by 
whom it is effected. Formerly it would be the expected and 



112 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

approved result of a successful war. In the provisions now made 
for the care and cure of the wounded, for the health and com- 
fort of the common soldier, including the voluntary labors of 
devoted physicians and nurses, we perceive a product of Christian 
feeUng. The Romans had their soldiers' hospitals {valetudinarid) ; 
but the vast and varied work of philanthropy in this direction, 
which belongs to our time, was something of which no man 
dreamed. 

Ancient slavery was generally the servitude of men of the same 
race as the master. It involved the forfeiture of almost all rights 
on the part of the slave. It was attended with a kind and degree 
of cruelty which the inteUigence of the victims, and the danger of 
revolt resulting from it, seemed to require, if the system was to be 
kept up. In extensive regions it had the effect, finally, almost to 
aboHsh free labor, to bring landed property into the hands of a 
few proprietors, to enervate the Roman spirit, and thus to pave 
the way for the downfall of the empire through the energy of un- 
civihzed but more vigorous races. Christianity found slavery 
everywhere. It preached no revolution ; it brought forward no 
abstract political or social theory ; but it undermined slavery by 
the expulsive force of the new principle of impartial justice, and 
self-denying love, and fraternal equahty, which it inculcated. 
From the beginning it counselled patience and quiet endurance ; 
but it demanded fairness and kindness of the master, brought 
master and slave together at the common table of the Lord, and 
encouraged emancipation. The law of Constantine (a.d. 321), 
which forbade all civil acts on Sunday, except the emancipation 
of slaves, was in keeping with all his legislation on the subject of 
slavery. It is a true index of the state of feeling which is mani- 
fest in the discourses of the eminent teachers of the Church of that 
period. Ancient slavery, and, afterward, serfdom in the medieval 
age, disappeared under the steady influence of Christian sentiment. 
The revival of slavery in modern times has been followed by a like 
result under the same agency. A century ago the slave-trade on 
the coast of Africa was approved by Protestant Christians. At 
first, after his conversion, John Newton, the pastor of Cowper, did 
not condemn it. But at length the perception dawned on his 
mind, and became a deep conviction, that the capture and enslave- 
ment of human beings is unchristian. The same conviction en- 
tered other minds. It grew and spread, until, in the treaties of 



POWER OF CHRISTIANITY TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY 113 

leading nations, the slave-trade has been declared to be piracy. 
This amazing change was not wrought by a new revelation. It 
was the effect of the steady shining of the light of Christian truth 
long ago recorded in the Scriptures. 

If it were practicable to dwell upon the varied consequences of 
the religion of Christ as they are seen in the actual state of Chris- 
tian civilization, we should have to trace out the modifications of 
political science under the benign influence of the gospel, the 
transforming effect of Christian ethics in such departments as 
prison discipline and penal law, the new spirit that breathes in 
modern literature, which emanates from Christian ideas of human 
nature, of forgiveness, and of things supernatural — a spirit which 
is vividly felt when one passes from the dramas of ^schylus to 
the dramas of Shakespeare — the way in which the arts of music, 
painting, and sculpture have developed new types of beauty and 
harmony from contact with the Christian faith, the indirect power 
of Christianity in promoting discoveries and inventions that con- 
duce to health and material comfort, the softening influence of 
Christianity upon manners and social intercourse, and even move- 
ments to protect animals from cruel treatment. But the topic is 
too broad to be pursued farther. 

To appreciate the magnitude of the results of Christianity, one 
must bear in mind that they do not consist alone or chiefly in ex- 
ternal changes. There is a transformation of thought and feeling. 
The very texture of the spirits of men is not what it was. The 
conscience and the imagination, the standards of judgment, the 
ideals of character, the ends and aims of human endeavor, have 
undergone a revolution. When a continent, with its huge moun- 
tains and broad plains, is gradually lifted up out of the sea, there 
is no doubt that a mighty force is silently active in producing so 
amazing an effect. What is any physical change in comparison 
with that moral and spiritual transformation, not inaptly called " a 
new creation," which Christianity has already caused? 

Now, the total effect of Christianity which Christendom — past 
and present, and future as far as we can foresee the future — pre- 
sents, is due to the personal agency of Jesus of Nazareth. It can 
even be shown to be largely due to a personal love to him which 
animated the Christians of the first centuries, and which still per- 
vades a multitude of disciples who call themselves by his name. 
Had this bond of personal gratitude and trust been absent, this 



114 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

vast result could never have come to pass. The power of Chris- 
tianity in moulding Christendom is undeniably owing to the reli- 
gious and supernatural elements which are involved in the life, 
character, and work of Jesus Christ. Had he been conceived of 
as merely a human reformer, a teacher of an excellent system of 
morals, a martyr, the effect would never have followed. Subtract 
the faith in him as the Sent of God, as the Saviour from sin and 
death, as the hope of the soul, and you lose the forces without 
which the religion of Jesus could never have supplanted the ancient 
heathenism, regenerated the Teutonic nations, and begotten the 
Christian civiHzation in the midst of which we live, and which is 
spreading over the globe. Men may raise a question about this 
or that miracle recorded in the gospels. The miracle of Christen- 
dom, wrought by Christ, is a fact which none can question. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE EVIDENCE OF THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY FROM ITS 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING AND FROM THE COMPARISON 
OF IT WITH THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY 

Christianity stands in an organic relation to the ancient reli- 
gion of the Hebrews. The very name " Christ " is an Old Testa- 
ment title. It is equally true, however, that Christianity is a signal 
advance upon the Old Testament religion. The Hebrew Scrip- 
tures themselves point forward to an era when the system of which 
they are the records is to resolve itself into something almost 
inconceivably higher. That Christianity is on that higher plane 
foreshadowed of old, the New Testament distinctly and emphati- 
cally declares, and it is quite evident. It did not confine itself to 
the reform of a system which had fallen into degeneracy. Far 
from it. Rather does it present itself in the teaching of Jesus, 
and elsewhere in the New Testament, as the absolute religion. 
It carries out to perfection whatever revelations had preceded. 
In this way alone could the ideal of the kingdom of God, before 
imperfectly conceived and dimly sketched, be realized. Through 
Christ the relation of God to the world is fully disclosed. In 
the long crusade against heathenism, along with the unity and 
personaHty of God, his transcendence was set forth in bold rehef. 
It was left to the religion of the New Testament to emphasize 
its counterpart, his immanence. He is in the world, although 
not to be identified with it. Through Christ the kingdom of God 
actually attains its universal character. Religion is not coincident, 
as in all the ancient communities, with the limits of a single com- 
munity. It is not restricted as was the cult of the Hebrew faith. 
The heavenly good of the gospel is of such a nature that it can 
be, and must be, offered indiscriminately to all men. The sense 
of a common relationship to Christ and to God melts away all 
differences. Appealing to a common religious sentiment, a com- 
mon consciousness of sin and of the need of help, and offering a 
remedy that is equally adapted to all mankind, Christianity shows 

"5 



Il6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

itself possessed of the qualities of a universal religion. Christianity 
vindicates for itself this character, as being a religion of principles, 
not of rules. Where the aim of the teaching of Jesus is accom- 
plished, the soul becomes a law to itself. The end which the soul 
sets before it is itself a criterion of what is to be done and what 
omitted. The purpose in view is to infuse a new Hfe. The work 
of the gospel, as it is depicted both by Jesus and by the Apostles, 
is to effect a new creation in humanity — to render his disciples 
new creatures in the fellowship with him. It thereby estabhshes 
a filial connection between man and God. In its inculcation of 
seminal principles, not seeking to dictate or restrain conduct 
farther than these may prompt, it shows itself the ultimate type 
of religion. As to things external, those who insist on a leaden 
uniformity, unmodifiable forms of polity and ritual, misconceive 
the teaching of Jesus and the catholic quality which permeates it. 

The injunctions of the gospel are not a closed aggregate of 
precepts, cut and dried. They are truths containing seeds of 
development, so that the compass of perceived obligations, the 
ramifications of Christian duty, are perpetually spreading. The 
sphere of moral culture and of Christian beneficence, in its basis 
ever the same, is continually opening out in new directions.^ Thus 
it is never outgrown and never obsolete. 

The ethical teaching of Jesus, confining moral good and evil to 
cherished feelings and inward purposes, attaches approval and 
condemnation, not to expressions in word and conduct in them- 
selves, but, in the case of evil, to the hidden germs within the 
soul, the impure desire, the vindictive wish, the unjust or unchari- 
table judgment, permitted in the heart. This is the exalted ideal 
of the gospel. 

In the teaching of Jesus, ethics and religion are inseparable. 
The essential nature of both is reducible to a single principle. 
In this particular His teaching is of transcendent worth. The duty 
is love to God in no confined measure, — love to the infinite Being, 
but like unto this law, that is, of a piece with it, and is impartial 
love to one's neighbor, — love to man. The sum of all obligations 
is the one principle of love to the universal society of which God 
is the head, and of which every man, being made in the image 
of God, yet finite in his nature, is a member and, in essential 
worth, the peer of every other. No simphfication could be more 

1 As illustrated admirably in Jesus Christ and the Social Question, by F. G. 
Peabody. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 1 17 

complete or exhaustive. It extends over the whole field of human 
obligation, and goes down to the root of character. 

Christian ethics is sometimes charged with serious defects. 
J. S. Mill observes, " I believe that other ethics than that which 
can be evolved from exclusively Christian sources must exist side 
by side with Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration 
of mankind." ^ He guards against misunderstanding by adding, 
" I beheve that the sayings of Christ are all that I can see any 
evidence of their having been intended to be ; that they are irrec- 
oncilable with nothing which a comprehensive morality requires ; 
that everything which is excellent in ethics may be brought within 
them, with no greater violence to their language than has been 
done by all who have attempted to deduce from them any prac- 
tical system of conduct whatever." ^ If nothing more were meant 
than that the New Testament does not pretend to define all the 
particulars of duty, but leaves them in some cases to be inferred. 
Mill's observation would be just. He refers, in support of his 
criticism, to the absence of any recognition, in Christian ethics, of 
duty to the State, to the negative character of Christian precepts, 
to an exclusive emphasis laid upon the passive virtues, and to the 
want of reference to magnanimity, personal dignity, the sense of 
honor, and the like — qualities which, he says, we learn to esteem 
from Greek and Roman sources. 

The imputation that Christian precepts are preeminently nega- 
tive, is surely not well founded. It is not " a fugitive and clois- 
tered virtue " which is enjoined in the New Testament. To do 
good is made not less obligatory than to shun evil.^ The religion 
which has for its work to transform the world is not satisfied with 
a mere abstinence from wrong-doing. 

It is not true that by insisting on mutual benevolence, Chris- 
tianity thereby weakens the force of particular obligations. The 
gospel does not frown upon patriotism any more than upon the 
domestic affections. Not the love of country, more than the love 
of kindred, is chilled by Christian teaching. The State, as well as 
the family, is recognized as a part of the divine order. Jesus was 
moved to tears by the doom of Jerusalem. It was an Apostle 
who loved his own people so ardently that he was willing to be 
accursed for their sake.* 

^ On Liberty, p. 93. ^ See e.g. Matt. v. 16, xxv. 43. 

2 p. 94. * Romans ix. 3. 



Il8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

If the passive virtues are prominent in the Christian system, it is 
not as the substitute, but as the complement, of quahties of another 
class. Revenge is unlawful ; truth is not to be propagated by vio- 
lence ; but unrighteousness in every form is assailed with an earnest- 
ness that admits of no increase. The non-resistance enjoined in the 
Sermon on the Mount is not a prohibition to inflict suffering upon 
wrong-doers, but to do this with retaliation as a motive, and not 
discerning the efficacy of the practice enjoined in the precept 
" overcome evil with good." Nor does the religion of the New 
Testament discountenance the use of force for the protection of 
society. The magistrate is the minister of God for the execution 
of justice. As for magnanimity, the sense of honor, and kindred 
feelings, they are included in the category of whatsoever things are 
true, honest, pure, lovely, and of good report.^ Christianity ex- 
cludes nothing that is admirable from its ideal of character ; and 
if there be virtues which have flourished on heathen ground, Chris- 
tianity takes them up, while at the same time it infuses into them 
a new spirit — the leaven of self-renunciation. 

Robust and aggressive elements enter into the Christian ideal 
of character ; yet there was a reason why, at the outset, stress 
should be laid upon meekness, patience, resignation, and the other 
virtues called passive. The foes of a Christian were of his own 
household. All the forces of society, civil and ecclesiastical, were 
combined against him. There was the strongest possible need for 
the exercise of just these qualities. Particular affections, like the 
love of home and of country, have a root in Christian ethics. But 
since Christianity came into a world where patriotism, and other 
affections limited in their range, exercised a control that supplanted 
the broader principle of philanthropy, it was requisite that the 
wider and more generic principles should be inculcated with all 
urgency, not with a view to extirpate or enervate, but to keep 
within bounds and to purify subordinate principles of action. In 
Christian ethics, all the virtues, the milder and the more nega- 
tive, with the bolder and the more heroic — courage in suffering 
and courage in action, the self-sacrifice of the mother in her house- 
hold, of the patriot on the battle-field, of the missionary to dis- 
tant nations — find a just recognition. 

In these inquiries it is important not to overlook the distinctive 

^ Phil. iv. 8. See also i Cor. xiii., a chapter which evidently reflects the 
spirit of the ethical teaching of Jesus. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY II 9 

character of Christianity. It is a rehgion. It is not primarily or 
chiefly a code of moral precepts. MoraHty finds a broader state- 
ment and a more impressive sanction, and, above all, it gains a 
new motive. But the morals of the gospel are not the first nor the 
main thing. Gibbon plumes himself on finding in Isocrates a pre- 
cept which he pronounces the equivalent of the Golden Rule. He 
might have collected like sayings from a variety of heathen sources ; 
although neither Confucius nor any other of the authors in whom 
these sayings are found contains the Christian precept in a form 
at once positive and not merely prohibitive, and in a form universal, 
and not merely in reference to certain particular relations in life — 
as to that of father and son. But an ethical precept, not very remote 
in its tenor, may undoubtedly be cited from a number of ethnic 
teachers, and also from ancient Rabbis. Nowhere, to be sure, has 
it the preeminence assigned to it in the legislation of Jesus.^ But 
the originality of the gospel does not consist in particular direc- 
tions pertaining to the conduct of life, however pure and noble 
they may be. On special points of duty it is true that Christianity 
speaks with an impressiveness never equalled elsewhere. But 
while an awe-inspiring tone is heard in its moral injunctions, not 
everything in them is absolutely novel. Christianity is, in its 
essence, a religion. Nor is the substance of Christianity to be 
found either in its doctrine of the immortality of the soul, nor in 
various other propositions which it is usual to classify under the 
head of rehgious beliefs. 

Christianity has been truly styled the religion of redemption. 
Here Hes its defining characteristic. It is the approach of heaven 
to men, the mercy of God coming down to Hft them up to a 
higher fellowship. The originality of Christianity is to be sought 
in the character and person of Christ and in the new life that 
goes forth from him, to be appropriated by the race of mankind. 

Probably no achievement of the human mind in the same field 
of thought outranks the Greek philosophy. In modern ages the 
literature on like themes is composed not without the potent 
aid of the Christian Scriptures, and the fight which has spread 

1 In the gospel, however, it does not supersede the need of the Christian 
exposition of that which the individual may rightfully claim or desire for him- 
self. It is given to rid the disciple of the misleading effect of a selfish bias; 
in other words, to brace him up on the weak side. 



120 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

from this source. As indicating the native power of the human 
intellect to ascertain the truth in the sphere of ethics and re- 
ligion, there is nothing which rises to the level of that develop- 
ment of philosophical thought which Bacon styles " the pagan 
divinity." Hence a comparison of it with the teachings of Christ 
and His disciples ought to aid us in solving the question whether 
there is a likehhood that Christianity owes its being to man alone, 
or, as, according to the Evangelist, the question is stated by Christ 
Himself, — whether the teaching be of God, or whether He speaks 
of Himself.^ 

The Greek Philosophy was a preparation for Christianity in a 
threefold way. It dissipated, or tended to dissipate, the supersti- 
tions of polytheism ; it awakened a sense of need which philoso- 
phy of itself failed to meet ; and it so educated the intellect and 
conscience as to render the gospel apprehensible, and, in many 
cases, congenial to the mind. It did more than remove obstacles 
out of the way. Its work was positive as well as negative. It orig- 
inated ideas and habits of thought which had more or less direct 
affinity with the religion of the gospel, and which found in this 
religion their proper counterpart. The prophetic element of the 
Greek philosophy lay in the glimpses of truth which it could not 
fully discern, and in the obscure and unconscious pursuit of a 
good which it could not definitely grasp. 

Socrates stands at the beginning of this movement. The pre- 
ceding philosophy had been predominantly physical. It sought 
for an explanation of nature. The mystic, Pythagoras, blended 
with his natural philosophy moral and rehgious doctrine ; but that 
doctrine, whatever it was, appears to have rested on no scientific 
basis. Socrates is the founder of moral science ; and the whole 
subsequent course of Greek philosophy is traceable to the impulse 
which emanated from this remarkable man. He was aptly styled 
by the Florentine Platonist of the Renaissance, MarsiUus Ficinus, 
the John the Baptist for the ancient world. 

I. The soul and its moral improvement was the great subject 
that employed his attention. All his inquiries and reflections, writes 
Xenophon, turned upon what was pious, what impious ; what honor- 
able, what base ; what just, what unjust ; what wisdom, what folly ; 
what courage, what cowardice ; what a state or poUtical commu- 
nity, and the like. This searching method of laying bare weak- 

1 John vii. 17. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 121 

ness and folly finally had the effect, as Xenophon records, that 
many " who were once his followers, had forsaken him." Who 
can fail to be reminded of the /nerai/ota — the self-judgment and 
reform — which were required at the very first preaching of the 
gospel ? 

2. Socrates asserted the doctrine of theism, and taught and ex- 
emplified the spiritual nature of religion. It is true that he believed 
in "gods many and lords many." But he believed in one su- 
preme, personal being, to whom the deepest reverence was to be 
paid. He taught the truth of a universal Providence. " He was 
persuaded," says the same disciple, "that the gods watch over the 
actions and affairs of men in a way altogether different from what 
the vulgar imagined ; for while these limited their knowledge to 
some particulars only, Socrates, on the contrary, extended it to 
all; firmly persuaded that every word, every action, nay, even our 
most retired deliberations, are open to their view ; that they are 
everywhere present, and communicate to mankind all such knowl- 
edge as relates to the conduct of human life." ^ He had only one 
prayer, that the gods would give him those things that were good, 
of which they alone were the competent judges. No service is so 
acceptable to the Deity as that of " a pure and pious soul." ^ He 
counselled absolute obedience to the Deity, and acted on this 
principle. He chose his career in compliance with an inward 
call from God, which he did not feel at Hberty to disregard. At 
his trial, in his Apology, he said, " Be of good cheer about death, 
and know this of a truth — that no evil can happen to a good 
man, either in life or after death." ^ 

3. Socrates had a belief, not a confident belief, in the future life 
and in the immortality of the soul. The last word in his final 
address is : " The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our 
ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only 
knows." ^ His last words to his friends, if we may trust the PhadOy 
were significant of a hope. ^ 

4. In the ethical doctrine of Socrates, virtue is identified with 

^ KoX 7 A/) iirifiekcicrdaL deoi/s ivbyn^ev dvdpdirup, oix o'' rpbirov ol iroWol 
vonl^ovaiv, oVtol fikv yap otovrai roi/s deovi to. ixkv elS^uai, ra 8' oiiK el8ivai. 
SwKpdrT^s 5^ iravTa pAv ijyeLTO 6eovs eidivai, rd re Xeydpeva Kal TrpaTTbp.eva 
KoX rd <TLy^ ^ovXevSp-eua, iravraxov 5^ irapeipai, Kal (Tr)p,aiveiv rots dvdpiOTTOis 
irepl Twv dvdpoiTreiuv irdvruiv. — Mem., I. i. 19. 

"^ Ment.y I. iii, 3. 3 Apology, \\ C. D. '' Ibid., 29 A. ^ Ibid., 42. 



122 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

knowledge, with the discernment of the highest good. This is 
evident from the reports of Xenophon, as well as from Plato. The 
perception of virtue could not fail to be attended with the prac- 
tice of it. None who saw the highest good, would fail to choose 
it.^ The doctrine of Socrates, which Aristotle also attributes to 
him, would, if logically carried out, resolve virtue into an intellect- 
ual state, and subvert the ground of moral accountableness for 
evil doing. Thus, unwittingly, he paved the way for that intellect- 
ualism which made the highest spiritual attainments accessible 
only to the gifted few — a spirit which pervaded the schools of 
Greek philosophy afterward. His aim was a worthy one, — to im- 
part to ethics a scientific character. 

5. He was personally far from disposed to exaggerate the in- 
tellectual powers of man, or to overlook the limits of human reason. 
On the contrary, he was characterized by a genuine humility. 

In passing to Plato, we do not leave Socrates ; but it is not pos- 
sible to draw the line, in the Platonic Dialogues, between the 
teaching of the master and the ideas and opinions of the more 
speculative disciple. The elevated tone of the Platonic system, 
and its many points of congeniality with Christian truth, have 
been recognized in the Church in ancient and in modern times. 
Men like Origen and Augustine, among the Fathers, were imbued 
with the Platonic spirit. Not a few, as far back as Justin Martyr 
and as late as Neander, have found in the lofty teaching of Plato 
a bridge over which they have passed into the kingdom of Christ. 
Turn where we will in these immortal productions, we are in the 
bracing atmosphere of a spiritual philosophy. We touch on some 
of the most important points which invite comparison with Chris- 
tian doctrine. 

I. Plato's conception of God approaches but fails to attain to 
that of Christianity. He teaches that God is a Person, a self-con- 
scious inteUigence. No other interpretation of his doctrine is so 
reconcilable with his various utterances on the subject.^ In the 

1 Mem., III. ix. 4. For further illustrative passages, see Ueberweg, Hist, 
of Philosophy, i- 85. 

2 By some his idea of the good is identified absolutely with God : but see 
Butler's Lectures on Ancient Phil., ii. 62, but also Thompson's note. See 
also Ritter, Hist, of Ancietit Phil., ii. 284. For other views of the passage in 
the Republic, vi. 508, see Zeller, Gesch. d, Griech. Phil., ii. 208, 309, 310. 



FFHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 1 23 

tenth book of The Laws he speaks of the " lost and perverted na- 
tures " who have adopted atheism. But Plato did not escape from 
the dualism which clung to Greek as well as to Oriental thinking. 
Matter is eternal, and is an independent and a partially intrac- 
table material. God fashions, He does not create, the world. 
Then, side by side with the Supreme Being, is the realm of ideas, 
the patterns and archetypes of whatever comes to be, and which, 
it is clear not only from Plato himself, but also from the polemical 
attitude of Aristode, are conceived of as substantial entities. By 
thus assigning to the ideas a kind of separate existence, Plato gave 
room and occasion for the pantheistic turn which his system as- 
sumed in the hands of professed Platonists of a later day. 

2. He followed Socrates in his implicit faith in divine Provi- 
dence, so far even as the care of the individual is concerned.^ But 
we miss in him, as in the ancient philosophers generally, any concep- 
tion of the final cause of history, of a goal to which the course of 
history tends, such as we have in the Christian idea of the kingdom 
of God on earth ; and hence there is wanting a broad and satisfy- 
ing conception of the Providence of God as related to mankind. 
Hellenic pride, the Greek feeling of superiority to the barbarian, 
was one thing which stood in the way of an ampler idea of the 
plan of God respecting the human race. Plato was not emanci- 
pated from this feeling.^ But as to the moral government of God, 
under which the good are rewarded and the evil chastised and 
punished, both in this world and in the world to come — this is a 
conviction with which his mind is profoundly impressed.^ 

3. Plato teaches the super- terrestrial properties and destiny of 
the soul. Man is possessed of a principle of intelligence — vov? 
— and is thus in the image of God. In a beautiful passage of the 
Fhcedo, the notion is confuted that the soul is a mere harmony of 
parts or elements, subject to the affections of the body. Rather is 
it a nature which leads and masters them — " herself a diviner thing 
than any harmony." ^ The soul is immortal. The inward Hfe is 
" the true self and concernment of a man." ^ " Let each one of 
us," says Plato, " leave every other kind of knowledge, and seek 

1 Phced., 62. 

2 Plato's objection to the distinction of Hellenes and Barbarians, in the 
Politicus (262), is on a logical ground; just as, in the context, he objects to 
the distinction of men and animals. 

* See Rep., x. 614. * Fhad., 94. ^ Rep., iv. 443. 



124 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn 
and find also who there is that can and will teach him to distin- 
guish the life of good and evil, and to choose always and every- 
where the better life as far as possible." ^ There are two patterns 
before men, the one blessed and divine, the other godless and 
wretched. It is utter folly and infatuation to grow like the last. 
We are to cling to righteousness at whatever sacrifice. " No man," 
says Plato, " but an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, 
but he is afraid of doing wrong. For, to go to the world below, 
having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and 
worst of all evils." ^ He goes so far, in a remarkable passage in 
the Gorgias, as to say that a righteous man, if he has done wrong, 
will prefer to be punished rather than deprive justice of her due. 
" The next best thing to a man being just, is that he should become 
just, and be chastised and punished." ^ His faith in immortaHty 
moved him to insist earnestly on the duty of caring for the spiritual 
part of our being.* We are to cling to righteousness at whatever 
sacrifice. 

4. Plato insists, moreover, on the need of redemption. But 
his idea of the nature of redemption is faulty from the defect 
that characterizes his notion of sin. Redemption is not strictly 
moral, the emancipation of the will from the control of evil, 
although this element is not ignored ; but it is the purification of 
the soul from the pollution supposed to be inevitable from its con- 
nection with matter. The spirit is to be washed from the effect 
of its abode in the body, its contact with a foreign, antagonistic 
element that defiles it. And what is the method of redemption ? 
Sin being conceived of as ignorance, as an infatuation of the under- 
standing, deliverance is through instruction, through science. Hence 
the study of arithmetic and geometry is among the remedies pre- 
scribed for the disorder of human nature. The intellect is to be 
corrected in its action. The reUance is predominantly upon teach- 
ing. Thus, Plato, through his dualism on the one hand, and the 
exaggerated part which he gives to the understanding in connection 
with moral action, on the other, fails to apprehend exactly both the 
nature of sin and of salvation. 

5. There is a Christian idea at the bottom of Plato's ethical 
system. Virtue he defines as resemblance to God according to 

1^^/., X.618. 3 7^/,/.^ 527 B. 

2 Gorgias, 522 E. * Phad., 107. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 125 

the measure of our ability.^ To be like God, Christianity declares 
to be the perfection of human character. But there was wanting 
to the heathen mind, even in its highest flight, that true and full 
perception of the divine excellence which is requisite for the ade- 
quate realization of this ethical maxim. We cannot but wonder 
at hearing Plato say, almost by inspiration, " In God is no 
unrighteousness at all — He is altogether righteous; and there is 
nothing more like Him than he of us who is most righteous." 
"To become hke Him is to become holy, just, and wise."^ Yet, 
with Plato, justice is the crowning virtue, the highest attribute of 
character. It is justice which keeps all the powers of the soul in 
harmony, and connected with this regnant virtue are wisdom, 
courage, and temperance, corresponding respectively to the 
several functions, reason, the will with the higher impulses of the 
spirit, and the appetitive nature. Plato has only an occasional 
glimpse of the higher principle of love, which Christianity makes 
the sum and source of moral excellence. It does not enter as an 
essential Hnk in his system.^ 

Moreover, the possession of virtue in the highest sense is possible 
only to the philosopher. And Plato says that the philosophic nature 
is a plant that rarely grows among men.^ In the ideal common- 
wealth, it is only the few who are endowed with philosophic reason. 
It is their prerogative to rule the many ; and it is only the few who 
are capable of realizing the moral ideal in its perfection. How 
opposed is this to the gospel, which offers the heavenly good to 
all ! The idea of an intellectual aristocracy, with respect to which 
Plato stands on the common level of ancient thought, is made 
somewhat less repulsive by the duty which is laid upon the philos- 
opher of descending " into the den," ^ and working among men, 
laboring " to make their ways as far as possible agreeable to the 
ways of God." ^ 

Plato's Republic offers the finest illustration of the loftiness of 
his aspirations, and, at the same time, of the barriers which it was 
impossible for him to surmount. This work gives evidence of the 
yearning of his mind for a more intimate union and fellowship of 
men than had hitherto existed. How could this aspiration be 

1 ThecBt., 176 A. "^ Ibid. 

* The Symposium^ which, though difficult of analysis, contains passages of 
great beauty, shows how far he went in this direction. 

■* Republic^ B, vi. ^ Ibid., vii. 519. '^ Ibid., vi. 501. 



126 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

realized? The only form of society in which he could conceive it 
possible for such a community to come into being, was the State. 
And, in order to give effect to his conception, individuality must 
be lost in the all- controlling influence and sway of the social whole. 
Plato says that in the best ordered state there will be a, common 
feehng, such as pervades the parts of the human body. He uses 
the very figure of St. Paul when he says of Christians that they 
are members one of another. But this relation could never be 
produced by any form of pohtical society. Besides this insur- 
mountable difficulty, Plato does not escape from the pride of race. 
It is an Hellenic state, which he will found, and the Hellenes are 
not to treat the barbarians as they treat one another, the Hellenic 
race being " ahen and strange to the barbarians." ^ The vision of 
the republic must, therefore, stand as an unconscious prophecy 
of the kingdom of Christ. The ancient heathen world could not 
supply the conditions demanded for its fulfilment. 

Aristotle, when compared with Plato, his great teacher and 
friend, presents fewer points of similarity to Christian teaching, for 
the reason that his mind is less religious, and that he confines him- 
self more closely to this mundane sphere, and to the phenomena 
that fall directly under human observation. 

1. Aristotle was a Theist. He undertakes a scientific proof of 
the existence of a supreme intelligent Being.^ His conception, 
though lofty, is defective from a Christian point of view, since 
God is brought into no constant, living relation to the world, as its 
Creator and Ruler, and, especially, no place is found for His 
moral government. 

2. Aristotle holds, likewise, to an immaterial, intelligent prin- 
ciple in man ; but he leaves it doubtful whether this element of the 
soul is invested with individuality, and thus whether our personal 
life continues after death. Ethics, according to Aristotle, relates 
to human conduct, and does not concern itself with the end or rule 
of action which the gods adopt for themselves. He sets forth no 
general principle like that of Plato, that we are to imitate God 
as far as possible. And as the highest bond of unity is political, 
ethics is treated as a subordinate branch of politics. He discerns 
and opposes the error of Socrates in confounding virtue with 

"^Rep.^ V. 470. 

2 Aristotle, Metaphys., B. xii., where the whole doctrine of God is syste- 
matically unfolded. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 12/ 

knowledge. He assigns to the voluntary faculty its proper place. 
If sin were merely ignorance, there would be no ground for blame 
or punishment. As far as men are the authors of their character, 
they are responsible for the attraction which, in consequence of 
that character, evil assumes. Aristotle is acquainted with no trans- 
forming principle which may dictate conduct the reverse of what 
has existed hitherto ; although, as Neander has pointed out, the 
doctrine of Aristotle as to the effect of moral action holds good 
when applied to the fortifying of a principle already implanted. 
One must be good in order to do good ; but it is a case where the 
fountain is deepened by the outflow of its waters. 

3. In the Fourth Book of the Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle 
describes the man of magnanimity, or noble pride. This por- 
traiture of the ideal man contains many features which, from a 
Christian point of view, merit approval. Yet the philosopher's 
ideal man, while he may be eager to do favors, will disdain to 
receive them. The character which is depicted by Aristotle in 
this remarkable passage is grand in its outlines, but it lacks the 
essential element, the very leaven, of Christian goodness, the spirit 
of humility and love. 

4. It is evident that Aristotle does not rise above the intellectu- 
alism which excludes the mass of mankind, on account of an 
alleged natural incapacity, from access to the highest good. In 
his treatise on politics he makes slavery to be of two kinds, one 
of which springs from violence and the law of war, and the other 
from the inferior mental powers of the enslaved.^ This last species 
of servitude he defends, on the ground that the enslaved are not 
fitted by nature for any higher lot. As reason in the individual is 
to the lower faculties, and as the soul is to the body, so is the 
enlightened class in society to those beneath them, who are ani- 
mated implements to be managed by their owners.^ In the New 
Testament the estimate of the spiritual worth of the slave is toto 
coilo different. 

5. At the close of his principal ethical treatise, Aristotle dilates 
with genuine eloquence on the lofty delight which belongs to in- 
tellectual contemplation, wherein man calls into exercise that part 
of his being in which he resembles the gods, and in this act must, 

^B. i. 3. 

2 With reference to occasional protests in Antiquity, against slavery, see J. 
Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire, Politique d'' Aristote, I. ii. § 3 n. 



128 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

therefore, be most pleasing to them. This is to live conformably 
to that which is highest in us, which is, to be sure, in bulk small, 
but in dignity and power is incomparably superior to all things be- 
sides. So doing, we, though mortal, put on, as far as may be, 
immortality. What Aristotle here describes, with so much depth 
of feeling, as the highest state of man, was necessarily conceived 
of, however, as the privilege of only a select few, while Christianity 
opens the door of access to the highest spiritual good, to all man- 
kind. Nor does Aristotle connect this elevated form of activity, 
as it exists either in God or men, with a principle of beneficence 
which is a fountain of blessing, not to the subject alone, but to 
universal society. On the question whether personal conscious- 
ness survives death, the great question of the immortality of the 
soul, the writings of this philosopher contain no clear and definite 
expression of opinion. 

From the time of Aristotle, the speculative tendency declined, 
and philosophy assumed a practical cast.^ Its themes were virtue 
and happiness ; its problems related to human life on earth. The 
later schools, for the most part, borrowed their metaphysics from 
their predecessors. Religious questions, such as the relation of 
Divine Providence to human agency, and to the existence of evil, 
became prominent. The individual was thrown back upon him- 
self, and became an object of consideration, not as a member of 
the state, but as a man, a member of the human race. The 
causes of this great philosophical change were various. The fall 
of the Greek political communites, the conquests of Alexander, 
the fusion of numerous peoples in the Roman Empire, were prom- 
inent sources of this intellectual revolution. The old political 
organizations, in which the life of the individual centred, were 
broken up. He was driven, almost, to look upon himself in a 
broader relation, as a citizen of the world. Moreover, the im- 
pulse which Socrates gave to ethical inquiry, although it was com- 
bined in him with a speculative element, and still more in Plato 
and Aristotle, continued to be potent, and became prevailing. 
The Stoic and Epicurean systems, antagonistic to each other as 
they appear to be, and as, in their particular features, they really 
are, manifest the same subjective character. Tranquillity and 
serenity of the inner life is the end and aim of both. Scepticism 

^ See, on this change, Zeller, Die Philosophic d. Griechen, vol. iii. i seq. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 129 

followed upon the rivalry of conflicting systems. Finally, the new 
Platonism appeared, a form of mysticism affording refuge to the 
believing but perplexed inquirer. 

Systems which, on account of their influence, we have occasion 
here to consider, are the Epicurean and the Stoic. 

The theology of Epicurus was a scheme of practical atheism. 
The adherents of this school did not deny the existence of the 
gods, but they denied to them any interest, or concern, in the 
affairs of the world. The current ideas of this philosophy are em- 
bodied, with wonderful skill and beauty, in the poem of Lucretius, 
which has for its subject the nature of things. To account for 
the origin of the world, he adopts the atomic theory of Democritus. 

The heavens and the earth, as they had a beginning, approach 
the epoch of decay and dissolution. The soul is material and 
mortal ; hence the dread of anything hereafter is needless and 
vain. All fear of the gods, with which men torment themselves, 
is irrational, since the gods stand aloof from men, and are ab- 
sorbed in their own enjoyments. The end and aim of existence, 
according to the Epicurean school, is pleasure. 

All good is resolved into pleasure. All special desires are to 
be subordinate to the general desire of happiness ; and in this 
notion of happiness, the approbation of conscience is not included. 
Virtue, therefore, is a self-regarding prudence. It is the control of 
a far-sighted expediency by which unruly instincts are restrained 
from the excess which occasions pain. The founders of this 
school led virtuous lives, but the doctrine contained no motives 
of sufficient power to curb the passions of men generally, and, in 
the progress of time, showed its real tendencies. 

Stoicism existed in two forms ; first, the original system of Zeno 
and Chrysippus, and, secondly, the modified Roman Stoicism of 
the first and second centuries of the Christian era. If we looked 
at the metaphysics of Stoicism, we should infer that this philoso- 
phy contained little or nothing in harmony with Christianity. It 
was a revival of the early materialistic Pantheism. Nothing exists 
but matter. The soul itself is a corporeal entity. The universe is 
one, and is governed by one all-ruling law. Matter and the Deity 
are identical — the same principle in different aspects. The Deity, 
that is to say, is the immanent, creative force in matter, which 
acts ever according to law. This principle, developed in the to- 
tality of things, is Zeus. It is Providence, or Destiny. The uni- 

K 



130 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

versal force works blindly, but after the analogy of a rational 
agency. The world, proceeding by evolution from the primitive 
fire, eventually returns to its source through a universal conflagra- 
tion, and the same process is to be renewed in an endless series 
of cycles. Fate rules all. The world is an organic unity ; con- 
sidered as a whole, it is perfect. Evil, when looked at in relation 
to the entire system, is good. The denial of free agency, and of 
immortality, was a corollary. As to the personaHty of the minor 
gods, the old Stoics were vacillating. Now they are spoken of as 
functions of nature, and now as persons. But if personal, they 
share the fate of men ; they disappear in the final conflagration. 

It seems strange that any system of morals worthy of the name 
could coexist with these ideas. The truth is, however, that the 
Stoics did not derive their ethics from their physical and meta- 
physical theories, and did not adjust these to their ethical doc- 
trine. The essential thing is to live according to nature. This is 
the great maxim of the Stoic ethics.^ By " nature " is meant the 
universal system in which the individual is one link. Sometimes, 
however, the constitution of the individual is denoted ; and some- 
times the term is used in a more restricted way still, to denote the 
rational faculty by itself. But to live according to nature is the 
one supreme, comprehensive duty. Virtue springs from rational 
self-determination, where reason alone guides the will, and the 
influence of the affections and emotions is smothered. These are 
contrary to reason ; they interfere with the freedom of the soul. 
No anger, no pity, no lenity, no indulgence — this was the pure 
creed of Stoicism. Apathy is the right condition of the soul, 
which should be moved only by reason. Knowledge is necessary 
to virtue, since right doing without rational insight does not fill out 
the conception of virtue. Hence the virtuous man is the sage, the 
wise man ; every other is a fool. Virtue, too, if it exist at all, 
must exist as a whole. It is a single principle ; and so, too, the 
vices are united. Hence the world is divided into two classes, — the 
virtuous or wise, and the wicked or foolish. 

This true ideal of primitive Stoicism was softened by the doc- 
trine of preferables. Virtue is the sole thing which is good in itself. 

1 Witness the teaching of Cleanthes, ap. Stob., EcL, ii. 132 (Ritter and 
Preller, p. 380, where are the parallel statements of Chrysippus). Their 
view is expounded by Zeller, Die Philosophie d. Griechen, vol. iii. § 35 : in 
Reichel's Engl, transl., p. 215. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 131 

But certain external things are auxiliary to virtue, and these may be 
called good, in a secondary sense ; and so external things, which 
are unfavorable to virtue, may be termed evil. There is, also, a 
third class of neutral things, not being either advantageous or hurt- 
ful in this relation. Thus the Stoics discussed the question whether 
fame is a preferable, and on this point were divided in opinion. 

Stoicism was cosmopolitan. It brought in the idea of a citizen- 
ship of the world. There is one community, one state, one set 
of laws. To this one state, all particular states are related, as 
are the houses in a city to one another. The sage labors that 
all may recognize themselves as one flock, and dwell together 
under the common rule of reason. Under the influence of this 
sentiment, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus utter counsels which 
resemble the New Testament injunctions of brotherly patience and 
lenity.^ One must give himself up with perfect resignation to the 
course of the world. There is a rationality and wisdom in it ; 
hence the duty of perfect, uncomplaining submission to things as 
they occur. " You must accuse neither God nor man," says Epic- 
tetus.^ " That," says M. Aurelius, " is for the good of each thing, 
which the universal nature brings to each." ^ 

The Roman Stoicism departed in certain particulars from the 
rigorous doctrines of the founders of the sect. There is a recog- 
nition, though not definite and uniform, of the personality of God, 
of the reality of the soul as distinct from the body, and of the con- 
tinuance of personal life after death. Especially in Seneca, the 
Stoic philosophy assumes a very mitigated aspect. Self-sufliciency 
gives way to a sense of weakness and imperfection, which in 
terms is allied to Christian feeling. There is a paragraph in his 
treatise on Clemency, in which he describes the sinfulness of man- 
kind in language which reminds one of the Apostle Paul.* Like 
Plato, he ascribes the creation to the goodness of God. Men are 
the children of God."* The sufferings of good men are the fatherly 
chastisement inflicted by Him. It is good for men to be afflicted ; 
those who have not experienced adversity are objects of pity. 
" Pray and live," he says, " as if the eye of God were upon you." ^ 
" Live every day as if it were the last."^ 

1 See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations^ vi. 44 ; Epictetus, Discourses, III. xxii. 54. 

2 Discourses, iii. xxii. 13. ^ De Prov., I. Cf. De Belief., ii. 29. 

* Med., X. 20, cf. X. 21. 6 /r^^ ^ 

* Ad Marc, xxiv. ; see, also, vi. "^ Ibid., xii. 



132 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The obligation to cherish just and human feelings is fre- 
quently asserted by Seneca. " Wherever a man is," he says, 
" there is room for doing good." ^ He condemns gladiatorial 
shows.^ He declares that " slaves are our fellow-servants," and are 
to be kindly treated.^ 

The coincidences between the moral teaching of Seneca and 
that of the New Testament are numerous and striking.^ The 
personal character of Seneca fell below his own exalted stand- 
ard of independence and excellence. But in Epictetus and 
Marcus Aurelius, theoretic principles were better exemplified as 
well as taught. 

The resemblance of parts of Stoic teaching to passages in the 
New Testament has naturally been thought to indicate an influ- 
ence from one side to the other. We know that the Apostle Paul 
was not a stranger to Stoic teaching, one of the centres of which 
was at Tarsus. At Athens he encountered Epicurean and Stoic 
philosophers.'^ In his address on the Areopagus he quoted, to sup- 
port his own doctrine, part of a verse found in two heathen poets.^ 
Passages in Epictetus in their import, and to some extent in phrase- 
ology, remind us of passages in the Evangelists. Of one of those 
passages '^ Lightfoot observes : " I can hardly beheve that the coin- 
cidence is quite accidental. Combined with numerous parallels 
in Seneca's writings collected above (pp. 281 seq.^^ it favors the 
supposition that our Lord's discourses in some form or other were 
early known to heathen writers." ^ As to personal character, 
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are not open to the criticism which 
Seneca, the tutor of Nero, fully deserves. Epictetus stands at 
the head of all the Stoic writers in the substance and in the spirit 
and tone of his utterances. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 
contain much that a Christian can read with earnest sympathy. 
In these writers Stoicism has lost much of its austerity and breathes 
a gentler spirit. A fictitious correspondence between Paul and the 
Roman philosopher was composed, probably, in the fourth century. 
It is possible that through intercourse with Christian slaves Seneca 
had gained some knowledge of the moral teaching of the gospel. 
But the evidence of a direct influence from the Christian side we 

1 De Vita Beata, 24. 2 Ep., vii. ^ Ibid., xlvii. 

* See Lightfoot, Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, pp. 259 seq. 

^ Acts xvii. 18. ^ Ibid., ver. 28. ' Discourses, iii. 22, 2 seq. 

^ Lightfoot, Dissertations, etc., p. 302, N. i. See, also, N. 3. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 133 

must not exaggerate. The sayings of Seneca, which " at first sight 
strike us by their resemblance to the language of the Apostles and 
Evangelists," when they are examined in their connection make 
a different impression. His most striking sentences are in a set- 
ting quite adverse to Christian teaching." " In his fundamental 
principles, he is a disciple of Zeno."^ 

It is a question how far this widening of sympathy, which we see 
in Stoicism, sprang from the indirect effect of gospel teaching 
upon the general currents of thought outside of the pale of the 
Church. Without denying that an influence of the character de- 
scribed was felt to some extent, it is yet possible to make too 
much of such a modifying agency. It is an evident fact that the 
tendency of political events and of philosophic thought — we might 
say, of the whole course of history — had been conducive to a more 
cosmopolitan view, a more catholic sympathy. The soil by degrees 
was becoming ready to receive the good seed of the gospel. The 
Stoic conception of a universal city, the idea of a common country 
of the race, are conceptions found in Roman writers from the time 
of Cicero, and, along with them, at least in theory, a broader spirit of 
humanity. For an explanation of phenomena of this nature we 
must not overlook the providential development within the con- 
fines of heathenism itself. Apart from Christian influence, they 
meet us in Lucan, in Plutarch, and in the letters of the younger 
Pliny.2 

When we bring the Stoical philosophy into comparison with 
Christianity, we discern some marked characteristics of a general 
nature which they have in common. First, Stoicism was an emi- 
nently practical system. It sought to determine how men should 
live, and how they could be prepared to bear trouble, and to die 
with composure. Secondly, like Christianity, it exalted inward, or 
spiritual excellence. All outward things are counted as nothing. 
The Stoic held power, fame, wealth, even health and life, as pos- 
sessions to be resigned without a murmur. Independence, inward 
freedom, was deemed the pearl of great price.^ And thirdly, there 
are certain sayings, and there are special injunctions, some of 

^ Lightfoot, ibid., pp. 276 seq. 

* See, for example, his Letter on the death of his slaves, to Paternus 
(viii. 16), or his Letter occasioned by the death of the daughter of Fundanus 
(V. 16). 

* See the chapter of Epictetus on *' Freedom," Diss., iv. i. 



134 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

which have been cited, in which the expressions of Stoic teachers 
approach near to the precepts of the Christian rehgion. 

The differences between Stoicism and the gospel are equally 
apparent. The resemblance between the two systems is seen, on 
a deeper study, to be more superficial than one would expect, and 
the discordance to be radical in its character. 

1. The basis of Stoicism, which was a crass materiahsm, is 
inconsistent with personal communion with God, and involves the 
logical consequences of Pantheism. Seneca, along with his pious 
and humane expressions, inconsistently " identifies God with fate, 
with necessity, with nature, with the world as a living whole. 
Hence he speaks of the Supreme Deity, under the designation 
"Jupiter," in language that would be blasphemous if it fell from 
the lips of a Christian theist.^ 

2. Stoicism makes virtue the ethical end. But Christianity, 
while giving the first place to holiness, is not indifferent to happi- 
ness. Love, the essential principle in Christian morals, is itself a 
source of joy, and seeks the happiness of its object. The Cynics 
were the precursors of the Stoics, and the leaven of Cynicism was 
never wholly expelled from the Stoic teaching. We find when 
we scrutinize the Stoical idea of virtue that it is practically self- 
regarding. It is not the good of others, but a subjective serenity, 
which is really sought for. The more benevolent feeling in the 
later type of Stoicism involves only a partial desertion of the 
essential characteristics of the school. 

3. The Stoic definition of virtue is formal, not material. It 
gives a certain relation of virtue, but not its contents. What that 
life is which is conformed to nature and swayed by reason, is not 
set forth in the definition. 

4. We are furnished with no concrete or exact conception of 
" nature." " Live according to nature," we are told ; but no 
criterion is presented for distinguishing between the original nature 
of man, and the corruption resulting from human perversity and 
sin. It is remarkable that Seneca acknowledges the need of a 
moral ideal, a pattern by which we can shape our conduct. He 
advises us to revolve the examples of good men and heroes, like 
Cato, in order to draw from them guidance ; though he admits 
their imperfection and consequent insufficiency for this end. It 
is a grand distinction of Christianity that it alone supplies this 

1 For the reference, see Lightfoot, Dissej'tations^ etc., pp. 277, 278. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 1 35 

need by presenting human nature, the realized ideal, in its purity 
and perfection, in the person of Christ. 

5. Stoicism supposes a possible incompatibility between the 
welfare of the individual and the course of the world. It implies 
a discordance in nature, which is in violation of a primary assump- 
tion that the system is harmonious. For the Stoics approved of 
suicide. Zeno and Cleanthes destroyed their own lives. Seneca 
praises Cato for killing himself. " If the house smokes, go out of 
it," ^ is the laconic mode of advising suicide in case one finds his 
condition unbearable — a phrase which we find in Epictetus and 
Marcus Aurelius. There might be situations, it was held, when it 
is undignified or dishonorable to continue to live. Poverty, chronic 
illness, or incipient weakness of mind were deemed a sufficient 
reason for terminating one's hfe. It was the means of baffling a 
tyrant, which nature had given to the weak ; as Cassius is made to 

say : — 

" Life, being weary of these worldly bars, 
Never lacks power to dismiss itself." ^ 

Seneca says that a man may choose the mode of his death, as 
one chooses a ship for a journey, or a house to five in. Life 
and death are among the adiaphora — things indifferent, which 
may be chosen or rejected according to circumstances. How 
contrary is all this to the Christian feeling ! The Christian be- 
lieves in a Providence which makes all things work together for 
his good, and believes that there are no circumstances in which he 
is authorized to lay violent hands upon himself. There is no sit- 
uation in which he cannot live with honor, and with advantage to 
himself as long as God chooses to continue him in being. 
Hence, in the Scriptures there is no express prohibition of 
suicide, and no need of one. 

6. Stoicism exhibits no rational ground for the passive virtues, 
which are so prominent in the Stoic morals. There is no rational 
end of the cosmos, no grand and worthy consummation toward 
which the course of the world is tending. Evil is not overruled to 
subserve a higher good to emerge at the last. There is no inspir- 
ing future on which the eye of the sufferer can be fixed. The goal 
that bounds his vision is the conflagration of all things. Hence 

^ Epictetus, Discourses, I. xxv, 18. The same simile is frequently used. 
Compare Seneca, Epp., xvii,, xxiv., xxvi. 
2 Shakespeare, _/m/zmj Casar, Act. I. sc. i. 



136 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

there is no basis for reconciliation to sorrow and evil. Christianity, 
in the doctrine of the kingdom of God, furnishes the element 
which Stoicism lacked, and thus provides a ground for resignation 
under all the ills of life, and amid the confusion and wickedness of 
the world. For the same reason, the character of Christian resig- 
nation is different from the Stoic composure. It is submission to 
a wise and merciful Father, who sees the end from the beginning. 
Hence, there is no repression of natural emotions, as of grief in 
case of bereavement; but these are tempered, and prevented 
from overmastering the spirit, by trust in the Heavenly Father. 
In the room of an impassible serenity, an apathy secured by 
stifling natural sensibihty, there is the peace which flows from filial 
confidence. 

7. Much less does Stoicism afford a logical foundation for the 
active virtues. The doctrine of fatalism, if consistently carried 
out, paralyzes exertion. And how is the motive for aggressive 
virtue weakened, when the ultimate result of all effort is annihila- 
tion — the destruction of personal life, and the return of the uni- 
verse to chaos ! 

8. The cosmopolitan quality of Stoicism was negative. Zeno's 
idea of a universal community, transcending the barriers imposed 
by separate nationalities, shows that the ancient order of things 
failed to satisfy the spirit, aspiring after a wider communion. Strik- 
ing sentences in Seneca ^ indicate that the limitations essential to 
ancient thought, which knew no fellowship broader than that of the 
State, were broken through. But such a community as Zeno and 
Seneca dreamed of, did not and could not arise, until the kingdom 
of Christ was established on earth. Then these obscure aspirations, 
and grand but impracticable visions, became a reality. 

9. The predominant motive which the Stoic moraHsts present 
for the exercise of forbearance and the kindred virtues is not love, 
but rather fealty to an ideal of character, the theory that sin is from 
ignorance, and is involuntary, which turns resentment into pity, 
and the consideration that everything is fated, and, in its place, 
useful. The offender is often regarded with a feeling akin to dis- 
dain. Among the ten motives to forbearance which Marcus 
Aurelius addresses to himself are some on which Christianity 
also insists. The sweeping remark, which is sometimes heard 
from the pulpit, that the duty of forgiving injuries was not known 

1 See De Bene/., iii. 18. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 137 

to the heathen moraUsts, is not true. Clemency is an impulse of 
human nature as truly as resentment. Christianity introduced no 
new element into the constitution of the soul. It gave fresh mo- 
tives for the exercise of forbearance, and, by its power to conquer 
selfishness, imparted to the benevolent sentiments a control which 
had never belonged to them before. It is likewise evident that 
the false metaphysics of the Stoic school played an important part 
in producing the temper of forbearance which they inculcated. Sin 
is ignorance, sin is fated, sin is for the best, anger disturbs the 
peace of the soul, — these are prominent among the reasons for 
the exercise of forbearance.^ 

ID. The self-sufficiency of Stoicism stands in direct antagonism 
to Christian humihty. The independence of the individual, the 
power to stand alone as regards men and the gods, is the acme of 
Stoical attainment. The Stoic felt himself on the level of Zeus, 
both being subject to fate ; and he aimed to find the sources of 
strength and peace within himself. Christianity, on the contrary, 
finds the highest good in the complete fellowship of man, sensible 
of his absolute dependence, with God. The starting-point is 
humility, a feeling the antipode of Stoical pride and self-asser- 
tion. It is a noteworthy but not inexplicable fact, that while 
many from the Platonic school, in the first centuries, became 
Christian disciples, very few Stoics embraced the Gospel. Not- 
withstanding the points indicative of resemblance and affinity, 
there was a radical antagonism between the two systems. 

The Greek philosophy reached the hmit of its development in 
New Platonism, as taught in the first centuries of the Christian era 
by Plotinus, and his successors, Porphyry and Jamblichus, and by 
Proclus, the last eminent representative of this school.^ Scepti- 
cism, the consequence of the bewildering conflict of philosophical 
theories, left no resting-place for minds of a religious turn. Their 
natural refuge was in mysticism, where feeling and intuition super- 
sede the slow and doubtful processes of the intellect. Plotinus 
found in Platonism the starting-point and principal materials for 
his speculations ; although the reconciliation of philosophies, and 
especially of the two masters, Plato and Aristotle, was a prominent 
part of his effort. 

1 See Epictetus, Discourses, IV. v. 32. 

2 Plotinus was born a.d. 204, and died A.D. 269. 



138 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

With Plotinus, the absolute Being, the antecedent of all that 
exists, is impersonal, the ineffable unity, exalted above all vicissi- 
tude and change. The idea of a creative activity on the part of 
God is thus excluded. Emanation, after a Pantheistic conception, 
would seem to be the method by which the universe originates 
from the primary being; yet this notion is discarded, since it 
would imply division in this being, and the imparting of a portion 
of its contents. Matter is evil, and the original fountain of evil. 
The human soul finds its purification only in separating itself from 
the material part with which it here stands in connection. The 
highest attainment and perfect blessedness lie in the ecstatic con- 
dition, in which the soul rises to the intuition and embrace of the 
Supreme Entity, sinking for the time its own individuality in this 
rapturous union with the Infinite. 

While the Platonic idea of resemblance to God, as the life and 
soul of virtue, is held in form, its practical value is lost by this 
sacrifice of personality in the object toward which we are to 
aspire. The " civil virtues " — wisdom, courage, temperance, and 
justice — are retained ; but higher than these are placed the puri- 
fying or cathartic virtues, by which the soul emancipates itself 
from subjection to sense ; while the highest achievement is the 
elevation to God, where the consciousness of personal identity is 
drowned in the beatific contemplation of the Supreme. 

This kind of rapture is possible only to elect spirits, who are 
qualified by superior endowments for so lofty an ascent. The 
supercilious tone of the ancient philosophy, the notion of an oli- 
garchy of philosophers, to whom the common herd are subservient, 
is thus maintained to the full in this final phase of Greek thought. 
" The life which is merely human," says Plotinus, " is twofold, 
the one being mindful of virtue and partaking of a certain good ; 
but the other pertaining to the vile rabble, and to artificers who 
minister to the necessities of more worthy men."^ Asceticism 
was the natural offspring of a system in which all that is corporeal 
is evil. Superstition, especially in the form of magic and sorcery, 
was likewise conspicuous in Jamblichus, and in the other later 
devotees of this school. 

Christianity holds to a possible illumination of the human mind/ 
and to a blessed communion with God. But this is not a boon 
open only to a few who are raised intellectually above the rest of 

^ Enn., ii. 9. 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 139 

mankind. The egoistic absorption of the individual in his own 
mental states, where the idea of doing good is banished from 
thought, or supplanted by a contempt for mankind generally, is 
abhorrent to the spirit of the gospel. Self-purification is an 
end which the Christian sets before him ; but he pursues it, not 
in the way of mystic contemplation, but by the daily practice of 
all the virtues of character.^ 

What were the actual resources of philosophy? What power 
had it to assuage grief, to qualify the soul for the exigencies 
of life, and to dehver it from the fear of death? An instructive 
answer to this inquiry may be gathered from the works of Cicero. 
Humanity, in the sense of a philanthropic regard for the race, is 
a word frequently upon his lips. In his political course, how- 
ever, and in dealing with ethical questions in the concrete, Cicero 
too often failed to exemplify these liberal maxims. There is a 
like failure to realize practically his religious theories. He appro- 
priates not without sympathy whatever is best in the Greek philo- 
sophical writers before him. In his work on the Nature of the 
Gods, and in that on Divination, he shows the folly of polytheism, 
and of the cultus connected with it. He wishes that it were as 
easy to discover the truth as to confute error.'"^ He is a Theist, 
preferring to follow Plato in the belief in a personal God, rather 
than the Stoics in their dogma of the impersonal spirit of nature. 
He finds in the wonderful order of the world irresistible evidence 
of the supreme Mind. He sees a corroboration of this faith in 
the concurrent judgments of men, as evinced in the universal 
prevalence of religion. Equally strenuous is he in maintaining 
that the soul is immaterial and immortal.^ But we have the 
opportunity of testing the character of his convictions when he 
is brought into circumstances of keen distress. What was the 
practical force and value of these opinions? We can see from 
the Tusculan Discussions which he composed when he was sixty- 
two years of age, after the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, 
and from his correspondence after this blow with Servius Sulpicius. 
When he is himself plunged into affliction, we find that neither 

1 This difference is clearly set forth by Neander ( Wissenschaftl. Abhandl., 
p. 213), in an essay to which the present writer owes the early stimulus given 
to the study of the subject of this chapter. 

2 De Nat. Deorttm, i. 32. 

* E.g. Disp. Ttisc, 1. xxvii., xxviii. 



140 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

he nor his intimate friends who strive to console him think of 
the truths on which he has eloquently descanted. There is a 
striking contrast between the discourses composed for the public 
eye, and the familiar letters which passed between him and these 
friends. In neither of his letters to Sulpicius is there the slightest 
reference to God, or to a future life. Cicero's treatise on Old 
Age is another monument of the vain attempt to elevate consid- 
erations which, when merely subordinate and auxiliary, have their 
value, into prime sources of consolation. The doctrine of the 
future life, even in Plutarch, is not set forth as a firm conviction, 
but only as a probability ; and he makes an argument in behalf 
of serenity, on the hypothesis, which is admitted to be not abso- 
lutely disproved, that death is the dissipation of our being, and 
the termination, therefore, of pain as well as of joy. The Stoic 
element which mingled in the character of Socrates, an element 
which is quite discernible in Plato's account of his Apology to his 
judges, crops out occasionally in the Platonic Dialogues, though 
connected with other tenets not consonant with the Stoical 
system. 

In Cicero's time, and in the century that followed, faith in the 
immortality of the soul is mostly confined to minds imbued with 
the Platonic influence. Julius Caesar treated the idea of a survival 
of the soul as a chimera.^ Tacitus, in the beautiful passage at the 
close of the Life of Agricola, refers to the opinion of philoso- 
phers that exalted souls may survive the body, but treats it 
as only a possibility. 

Philosophy yielded a certain amount of strength and solace to 
able and cultivated men ; an increased amount, we may say, 
among the Romans, in the second century as compared with the 
age that witnessed the introduction of Christianity. Philosophers 
sometimes acted, from their point of view, not unworthily the part 
of spiritual counsellors. The Stoics looked forward to a continu- 
ance for an indefinite, though limited, period, of personal life 
beyond the grave. Platonists may not frequently have cherished 
a larger hope. But it must be remembered that philosophy 
exerted no appreciable influence on the mass of mankind, either 
in the way of restraint or of inspiration. They were left in the 
adversities of life, in sickness, in bereavement, and in death, to 
such consolation as was to be drawn from the old mythological 

1 Sallust (B.C. 50). 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY 141 

system. The epitaphs in memory of the dead in some cases 
betray a gross materiaUsm, in other cases a bitter and resentful 
despair ; while many express a hope in behalf of the beloved who 
are gone, which is slow to be quenched in the human heart. 

When we look back upon the ancient philosophy in its entire 
course, we find in it nothing nearer to Christianity than the saying 
of Plato that man is to resemble God. But, on the path of specu- 
lation, how defective and discordant are the conceptions of God ! 
And if God were adequately known, how shall the fetters of evil be 
broken, and the soul attain to its ideal ? It is just these questions 
that Christianity meets through the revelation of God in Jesus 
Christ. God, the Head of that universal society on which Cicero 
delighted to dwell, and ruling with no divided control, is brought, 
in all His holiness and love, near to the apprehension and to the 
hearts, not of a coterie of philosophers merely, but of the humble 
and ignorant. The words of Jesus, spoken of the Hebrew Law- 
givers and Prophets, are applicable to the best of the Stoic Sages, 
and to Plato — unconscious though they were of their intermediary 
function — "I am not come to destroy but to fulfil." There is a 
real release from the burden of evil, achieved through Christ, 
actually for himself in his own spotless purity, and potentially 
for mankind. How transfigured in their whole character are 
the ethical maxims which, as to form, may not be without a 
parallel in heathen sages ! Forgiveness, forbearance, pity for the 
poor, universal compassion, are no longer abstractions, derived 
from speculation on the attributes of Deity. They shine out in 
the example of God. He has so dealt with us in the mission and 
death of His Son.^ The Cross of Christ was the practical power 
that abolished artificial distinctions among mankind, and made 
human brotherhood a reality. In this new setting, ethical pre- 
cepts gain a depth of earnestness and a force of impression which 
ethnic philosophy could never impart. We might as well expect 
from starlight the brightness and warmth of a noonday sun. 

1 See Col. iii. 12; Eph. iv. 32; l Pet. ii. 18; 2 Cor. x. i; Luke xxii. 27; 
John xiii. 14 ; I John iii. 16 ; 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; Eph. v. 2 ; Phil. ii. 7 ; and the 
New Testament passim. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE CONSCIOUSNESS IN JESUS OF A SUPERNATURAL CALLING RENDERED 
CREDIBLE BY HIS SINLESS CHARACTER 

Writers on the evidences of Christianity, after some introduc- 
tory observations on natural theology, generally take up at once 
the subject of the genuineness and credibility of the Gospels, 
for the obvious reason that in these books, if anywhere, is preserved 
the authentic testimony to the facts connected with the life of 
Jesus. There are reasons, however, of special weight at present, 
why this leading topic may well be deferred to a somewhat later 
stage of the discussion. Notwithstanding differences of opinion 
respecting the authorship and date of the New Testament narra- 
tives, there are not wanting grounds for accepting as true the es- 
sential facts which form the basis of the Christian faith. It is 
important to remember, that besides these books, there exist 
other memorials, written and unwritten, of the events with which 
we are concerned. We have St. Paul's Epistles, — the most promi- 
nent of which are not contested even by the most sceptically 
disposed, — the oldest of which, probably, the first to the Thes- 
salonians, was written certainly as early as the year 53. But, more 
than this, there are cogent proofs, and there are strong probabil- 
ities which may be gathered from known and admitted conse- 
quences of the life of Jesus among men. We can reason backwards. 
Even a cursory glance at Christianity in the course of its acknowl- 
edged history, and as an existing phenomenon standing before the 
eyes of all, is enough to convince everybody that something very 
weighty and momentous took place in Palestine in connection with 
the short career of Jesus. There followed, for example, indisput- 
ably, the preaching, the character, the martyrdom, of Apostles 
appointed by him. The Church started into being. The com- 
position of the Gospels themselves, whenever and by whomsoever 
it occurred, was an effect traceable ultimately to the Hfe of Jesus. 

142 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 143 

How came they to be written? How did what they relate of him 
come to be beheved? How came miracles to be attributed to 
him, and not to John the Baptist and to Palestinian rabbis of the 
time? Effects imply adequate causes. A pool of water in the 
street may be explained by a summer shower, but not so the Gulf 
Stream. Effects imply such causes as are adapted to produce 
them. The results of a movement disclose its nature. When we 
are confronted by historical phenomena, complex and far-reaching 
in their character, we find that no solution will hold which subtracts 
anything essential from the actual historic antecedents. If we 
ehminate any of the conjoined causes, we find that something in 
the aggregate effect is left unexplained. Moreover, the elements 
that compose a state of things which gives rise to definite histori- 
cal consequences are braided together. They do not easily allow 
themselves to be disconnected from one another. Pry out one 
stone from an arch, and the entire structure will fall. It is a prov- 
erb that a liar must have a long memory. It is equally true that 
an historical critic exposes himself to peril whenever he ventures 
on the task of constructing a situation in the past, a combination 
of circumstances, materially diverse from the reality. Events as 
they actually occur constitute a web from which no part can be 
torn without being instantly missed. History, then, has a double 
verification ; first, in the palpable eifects that are open to every- 
body's inspection ; and secondly, in the connected relation, the 
internal cohesion, of the particulars that compose the scene. Let 
any one try the experiment of subtracting from the world's history 
any signal event, like the battle of Marathon, the teaching of Aris- 
totle, or the usurpation of Julius Caesar. He will soon be convinced 
of the futility of the attempt ; and this apart from the violence that 
must be done to direct historical testimonies. 

Matthew Arnold tells us, that "there is no evidence of the 
establishment of our four Gospels as a gospel canon, or even of 
their existence as they now finally stand at all, before the last 
quarter of the second century."^ This statement in both of its 
parts needs correction. The theory at the basis of such views, of 
a gradual selection of the four out of a large group of competitive 
Gospels, and of the growth of them by a slow process of accretion, 
is untenable. It can be proved to rest on a misconception of the 
state of things in the early Church, and to be open to other insu- 
1 God and the Bible, p. 224. 



144 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

perable objections. But let the assumption contained in the quo- 
tation above be allowed, for the present, to stand. Such authors 
as Strauss, Renan, Keim, notwithstanding their rejection of re- 
ceived opinions respecting the authorship and date of the Gospels, 
do not hesitate to draw from them the materials for their biogra- 
phies of Jesus. They undertake, to be sure, to subject them to a 
sifting process. We have to complain that their dissection is too 
often arbitrary, being dictated by some presupposition merely sub- 
jective, or determined by the exigencies of a theory. Professing 
to be scientific, they are warped by what is really an unscientific 
bias. But large portions of the evangelic narratives they hold to 
be authentic. If they did not do this, they would have to lay 
down the pen. Their vocation as historians would be gone. 
We may inquire then what will follow, if we take for granted no 
more of the contents of the Gospels than what is conceded to be 
true, — no more, at any rate, than what can be proved on the spot 
to be veritable history. Waiving, for the moment, — as we have 
done in the foregoing pages, — controverted questions about the 
origin of these books, let us see what conclusions can be fairly 
deduced from portions of them which no rational critic will con- 
sider fictitious. Having proceeded as far as we may on this path, 
it will then be in order to inquire whether the Gospels are not to 
be classed in the list of genuine and trustworthy narratives, in 
opposition to the opinion that they are of later origin, and com- 
pounded of fact and fiction. 

I. The known assertions of Jesus respecting his calling, and 
his authority among men, if they are not well founded, imply 
either a lack of mental sanity, or a deep perversion of char- 
acter ; but neither of these last alternatives can be reasonably 
accepted. 

No one can reasonably doubt that Jesus professed to be the 
Christ — the Messiah. The time and manner of making this 
declaration can be considered hereafter. This the apostles from 
the first, in their preaching, declared him to be. They went out 
preaching, first of all, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. It 
was on account of this claim that he was put to death. Before 
his judges, Jewish and Roman, he for the most part kept silent. 
Seeing that they were blinded by passion, or swayed by purely 
selfish motives, he abstained from useless appeals to reason and 
conscience. But he broke silence to avow that he was indeed 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 145 

the king, the " Son of God," — a title of the Messiah.^ It was 
held by the Jewish magistrates to be a blasphemous pretension.^ 
He made it clear, then and at other times, what sort of a kingship 
it was which he asserted for himself. It was not a temporal sov- 
ereignty, " a kingdom of this world " ; no force was to be used in 
the founding or extension of it. It was, however, a control far 
deeper and wider than any secular rule. He was the monarch of 
souls. His right was derived immediately from God. His legis- 
lation reached down to the inmost motives of action, and covered 
in its comprehensive principles all the particulars of conduct. In 
the Sermon on the Mount he spoke with an authority which was 
expressly contrasted with that of all previous lawgivers counted to 
be inspired by those who heard Him — " But / say unto you," etc.^ 
To his precepts he annexed penalties and rewards which were to 
be endured and received even beyond the grave. Nay, his call 
was to all to come to him, to repose in him implicit trust as a 
moral and religious guide. He laid claim to the absolute alle- 
giance of every soul. To those who compHed he promised blessed- 
ness in the life to come. There can be no doubt that he assumed 
to exercise the prerogative of pardoning sin. Apart from declara- 
tions, uttered in an authoritative tone, of the terms on which God 
would forgive sin,* he assured particular individuals of the pardon 
of their transgressions. He taught that his death stood in the closest 
relation to the remission of sins by the judge of all the earth. The 
divine clemency toward the sinful is somehow linked to it. He 
founded a rite on this efficacy of his death, — a part of his teaching 
which is not only recorded by three of the gospel writers, but is fur- 
ther placed beyond doubt by the testimony of the apostle Paul.^ He 
uttered, there is no reason to doubt, the largest predictions con- 
cerning the spread of his spiritual empire. It was to have the 
transforming power of leaven. It was to be like the plant which 
springs from the tiny mustard-seed.^ The agency of God would 
be directed to securing its progress and triumph. The Providen- 
tial government of the world would be shaped with reference to 
this end. 

^ Matt. xxvi. 64, xxvii. 11, cf. vers. 29, 37; Mark xiv. 62, xv. 2, cf. vers. 9, 
12, 18, 26 ; Luke xxii. 70, xxiii. 2, cf. vers. 2, 38 ; John xviii. 33, 37, cf. ver. 
39, xix. 3, 14, 19, 21. 2 Matt. xxvi. 65 ; Mark xiv. 64. 

3 Matt. V. 22, 28, 34, 39, 44. ^ I Cor. xi. 25. 

^ Ibid., V. 26, vi. 14, 15. 6 Matt. xiii. 31-33 ; Luke xiii. 19-21. 

L 



146 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

We have stated in moderate terms the claims put forth by Jesus, 
These statements, or their equivalent, enter into the core of the 
evangelic tradition. Not only are they admitted to be authen- 
tic passages in the Gospels, but their historic reality is presup- 
posed in the first teaching of Christianity by the Apostles, and 
must be assumed in order to account for the rise of the Church. 

Let it be remembered that these pretensions are put forth by a 
person with no advantages of social position. He is brought up 
in a village not held in esteem by the rehgious leaders of the time. 
On his fellow-villagers generally he has made no lasting impres- 
sion. He has barely passed the limit of youth. When he appears 
among them as a teacher, they refer to his connection with a family 
in the midst of them in a tone to imply that they had known of 
nothing to kindle a remarkable expectation concerning him.^ 
For this passage in the Gospel narrative bears indisputable marks 
of authenticity. 

What shall be said of such claims, put forth by such a person, 
or by any human being ? No doubt the first impression in such a 
case would be, that he had lost his reason. If there is not wilful im- 
posture, it would be said, it must be a case of mental derangement. 
Nothing else can explain so monstrous a delusion. Imagine that a 
young man who has always lived quietly at home in a country town 
presents himself in one of our large cities, and announces himself 
there, and to his fellow-townsmen, and wherever else he can gain 
a hearing, as the representative of God ; summons all, the high 
and low, the educated and ignorant, to accept him as a special 
messenger from Heaven, to obey him implicitly, to break every 
tie which interferes with absolute obedience to him, — to hate, as 
it were, father and mother, wife and children, for his cause. He 
proceeds, we will suppose, in the name of God, to issue injunc- 
tions for the regulation of the thoughts even, as well as of external 
conduct, to forgive the sins of one and another evil-doer, and to 
warn all who disbelieve in him and disregard his commandments, 
that retribution awaits them in the future life. It being made 
clear that he is not an impostor, the inference would be drawn at 
once that his reason is unsettled. This, in fact, is the common 
judgment in such cases. To entertain the belief that one is the 
Messiah is a recognized species of insanity. It is taken as proof 
positive of mental aberration. This is the verdict of the courts. 
1 Matt. xiii. 55-57; Mark vi. 3, 4; Luke iv. 22. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 147 

Erskine, the famous Scottish lawyer, in one of his celebrated 
speeches,^ adverts to an instance of this kind of lunacy. A man 
who had been confined in a mad-house prosecuted the keeper, Dr. 
Sims, and his own brother, for unlawful detention. Erskine, be- 
fore he had been informed of the precise nature of his delusion, 
examined the prosecutor without eliciting any signs of mental 
unsoundness. At length, learning what the particular character of 
the mental disorder was, the great lawyer, with affected reverence, 
apologized for his unbecoming treatment of the witness in pre- 
suming thus to interrogate him. The man expressed his forgive- 
ness, and then, with the utmost gravity, in the face of the whole 
court, said, " I am the Christ ! " He deemed himself " the Lord 
and Saviour of mankind." Nothing further, of course, was re- 
quired for the acquittal of the persons charged with unjustly 
confining him. 

When it is said that claims like those of Jesus, unless they can 
be sustained, are indicative of mental derangement, we may be 
pointed, by way of objection, to founders of other systems of re- 
ligion. But among these no parallel instance can be adduced to 
disprove the position here taken. Confucius can hardly be styled 
a religious teacher ; he avoided, as far as he could, all reference 
to the supernatural. His wisdom was of man, and professed no 
higher origin. A sage, a sagacious moralist, he is not to be clas- 
sified with pretenders to divine illumination. Of Zoroaster we 
know so little, that it is utterly impossible to tell what he affirmed 
respecting his relation to God. The very date of his birth is now 
set back by scholars to a point at least five hundred years earlier 
than the time previously assigned for it. Of him, one of the 
authorities remarks, ''The events of his Hfe are almost all en- 
shrouded in darkness, to dispel which will be forever impossible, 
should no authentic historical records be discovered in Bactria, 
his home." ^ A still later writer goes farther : " When he lived, 
no one knows ; and every one agrees that all that the Parsis and 
the Greeks tell of him is mere legend, through which no solid his- 
torical facts can be arrived at."^ Thus the history of the princi- 

1 In behalf of Hadfield, indicted for firing a pistol at the king. 

2 Haug, Essays on the Laws, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis (2(1 ed., 
Boston, 1868), p. 295. 

^ The Zend-Avesta^ translated by J. Darmesteter (Oxford, 1880), Intr., p. 
Ixxvi. 



148 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

pal teacher of one of the purest and most ancient of the ethnic 
rehgions is veiled in hopeless obscurity. With respect to Buddha, 
or Sakyamuni, it is not impossible to separate main facts in his 
career from the mass of legendary matter which has accumulated 
about them. But the office which he took on himself was not 
even that of a prophet. He was a philanthropist, a reformer. 
The supernatural features of his history have been grafted upon it 
by later generations. An able scholar has described Buddhism 
as "a rehgion which ignores the existence of God, and denies the 
existence of the soul." ^ " Buddhism is no religion at all, and cer- 
tainly no theology, but rather a system of duty, morality, and be- 
nevolence, without real deity, prayer, or priest." ^ Mohammed 
unquestionably believed himself inspired, and clothed with a di- 
vine commission. Beyond the ferment excited in his mind by the 
vivid perception of a single great, half- forgotten truth, we are aided 
in explaining his self-delusion, as far as it was a delusion, by due 
attention to morbid constitutional tendencies which occasioned 
epileptic fits, as well as to reveries and trances. Moreover, there 
were vices of character which played an important part in nour- 
ishing his fanatical convictions. These must be taken into the 
account. It is not maintained here that rehgious enthusiasm 
which passes the limits of truth should always raise a suspicion of 
insanity. We are not called upon by the necessities of the argu- 
ment to point out the boundary-line where reason is unhinged. 
Socrates was persuaded that a demon or spirit within kept him 
back from unwise actions. Whether right or wrong in this belief, 
he was no doubt a man of sound mind. One may erroneously 
conceive himself to be under supernatural guidance without being 
literally irrational. But if Socrates, a mortal like the men about 
him, had solemnly and persistently declared himself to be the 
chosen delegate of the Almighty, and to have the authority and 
the prerogatives which Jesus claimed for himself ; had he declared, 
just before drinking the hemlock, that his death was the means or 
the guaranty of the forgiveness of sins, — the sanity of his mind 
would not have been so clear. 

Nor is there validity in the objection that times have changed, 
so that an inference which would justly follow upon the assertion 
of so exalted claims by a person now living would not be warranted 

1 See Encycl. Brit., art. "Buddhism," by J. W. Rhys Davis. 
* Monier Williams, Hinduism (London, 1877), p. 74. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 149 

in the case of one living in that remote age, and in the community 
to which Jesus belonged. The differences between that day and 
this, and between Palestine, and America or England, are not of 
a quality to lessen materially the difficulty of supposing that a man 
in his right mind could falsely believe himself to be the King and 
Redeemer of mankind. The conclusive answer to the objection 
is, that the claims of Jesus were actually treated as preposterous. 
They were scoffed at as most presumptuous by his contemporaries. 
He was put to death for bringing them forward. Shocking blas- 
phemy was thought to be involved in such pretensions. It is true 
that individuals in that era set up to be the Messiah, especially in 
the tremendous contest with the Romans that ensued. But these 
false Messiahs were impostors, or men in whom imposture and 
wild fanaticism were mingled. 

Mental disorder was then, and has been since, imputed to Jesus. 
At the beginning of his public labors at Capernaum, his relatives, 
hearing what excitement he was causing, and how the people 
thronged upon him, so that he and his disciples could not snatch 
a few minutes in which to take refreshment, for the moment feared 
that he was " beside himself." ^ No doubt will be raised about 
the truth of this incident. It is not a circumstance which any 
disciple, earlier or later, would have been disposed to invent. The 
Pharisees and scribes charged that he was possessed of a demon. 
According to the fourth Gospel, they said, " He hath a demon, and 
is mad." ^ The credibility of the fourth evangehst here is assumed 
by Renan.^ In Mark, the charge that he is possessed by the 
prince of evil spirits immediately follows the record of the attempt 
of his relatives " to lay hold on him." ^ Not improbably, the evan- 
gelist means to imply that mental aberration was involved in the 
accusation of the scribes, as it is expressly said to have been 
imputed to him by his family. This idea of mental alienation has 
not come alone from the Galilean family in their amazement at the 
commotion excited by Jesus, and in their solicitude on account of, 
his unremitting devotion to his work. Nor has it been confined 

1 Mark iii. 21, cf. ver. 32. In ver. 21 eXeyop may have an indefinite subject, 
and refer to a spreading report which the relatives — ol irap avrov — had 
heard : so Ewald, Weiss, Marcusevangelium ad loc. Or it may denote what 
was said by the relatives themselves : so Meyer. 

2 fiaiverai, John x. 20. 

^Renan, Vte de Jcstis, r3th ed., p. 331. *Mark iii. 21. 



150 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

to the adversaries who were stung by his rebukes, and dreaded 
the loss of their hold on the people. A recent writer, after speak- 
ing of Jesus as swept onward, in the latter part of his career, by a 
tide of enthusiasm, says, " Sometimes one would have said that his 
reason was disturbed." " The grand vision of the kingdom of God 
made him dizzy." -^ " His temperament, inordinately impassioned, 
carried him every moment beyond the limits of human nature." ^ 
These suggestions of Renan are cautiously expressed. He broaches, 
as will be seen hereafter, an hypothesis still more revolting, for the 
sake of clearing away difficulties which his Atheistic or Pantheistic 
philosophy does not enable him otherwise to surmount. Yet he 
does, though not without some signs of timidity, more than insin- 
uate that enthusiasm was carried to the pitch of derangement. 
Reason is said to have lost its balance. 

The words and conduct of Jesus can be considered extravagant 
only on the supposition that his claims, his assertions respecting 
himself, were exaggerated. His words and actions were not out 
of harmony with these claims. It is in these pretensions, if any- 
where, that the proof of mental alienation must be sought. There 
is nothing in the teaching of Christ, there is nothing in his ac- 
tions, to countenance in the least the notion that he was dazed 
and deluded by morbidly excited feehng. Who can read the 
Sermon on the Mount, and not be impressed with the perfect 
sobriety of his temperament? Everywhere, in discourse and dia- 
logue, there is a vein of deep reflection. He meets opponents, 
even cavillers, with arguments. When he is moved to indignation, 
there is no loss of a cool self-possession. There is no vague 
outpouring of anger, as of a torrent bursting its barriers. Every 
item in the denunciation of the Pharisees is coupled with a dis- 
tinct specification justifying it.^ No single idea is seized upon 
and magnified at the expense of other truths of equal moment. 
No one-sided view of human nature is held up for acceptance. 
A broad, humane spirit pervades the precepts which he uttered. 
Asceticism, the snare of religious reformers, is foreign both to his 
teaching and his example. Shall the predictions relative to the 
spread of his kingdom, and to its influence on the world of man- 
kind, be attributed to a distempered fancy ? But how has history 
vindicated them ! What is the history of the Christian ages but 

^ " Lui donnait le vertige." 2 y^g de Jesus, 13th ed., p. 331. 

3 Matt, xxiii. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 151 

the verification of that forecast which Jesus had of the effect of 
his work, brief though it was? Men who give up important parts 
of the Christian creed discern, nevertheless, " the sweet reason- 
ableness " which characterizes the teaching, and, equally so, the 
conduct, of Jesus. The calm wisdom, the inexhaustible depth be- 
comes daily more and more apparent as time flows on — is that 
the offspring of a disordered brain? That penetration into human 
nature which laid bare the secret springs of action, which knew 
men better than they knew themselves, piercing through every 
mask — did that belong to an intellect unbalanced? 

Jesus was no enthusiast, if that designation is taken to imply 
an overplus of fervor or a heated imagination. If fanaticism is dis- 
tinguished from bare enthusiasm, as according to Isaac Taylor 
it should be, by having in it an ingredient of hatred, no reproach 
could be more unmerited than the ascription to Jesus of this 
odious quaHty. 

If we reject the hypothesis of mental weakness or disorder, we 
are driven to the alternative of accepting the consciousness of 
Jesus, with respect to his office and calling, as sane and veracious, 
or of attributing to him moral depravation. He exalts himself 
above the level of mankind. He places himself on an eminence 
inaccessible to all other mortals. He conceives himself to stand 
in a relation both to God and to the human race to which no 
other human being can aspire. If, to speak of one thing, the 
remission of sins is declared by churches or by the clergy, it is 
always made conditional on repentance, and by an authority con- 
sidered to be derived from Christ. It would be a wild dream for 
any other human being to imagine himself to be possessed of the 
prerogatives which Jesus quietly assumes to exercise. Is this mere 
assumption ? What an amount of self-ignorance does it not involve ! 
What self- exaggeration is implied in it ! If moral rectitude con- 
tains the least guaranty of self-knowledge, if purity of character 
qualifies a man to know himself, and guard himself from seeking 
to soar to an elevation to which he has not a shadow of a right, 
then what shall be said of him who is guilty of self-deification, or 
of what is almost equivalent? On the contrary, the holiness of 
Jesus, if he was holy, is a ground for reposing confidence in his 
convictions respecting himself. 

If there is good reason to conclude that Jesus was a sinless man, 
there is an equal reason for believing in him. It has been said, 



152 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

even by individuals among the defenders of the faith, that, inde- 
pendently of miracles, his perfect sinlessness cannot be estab- 
lished. " But where," it has been said, " is the proof of perfect 
sinlessness? No outward life and conduct could prove this, 
because goodness depends on the inward motive, and the per- 
fection of the inward motive is not proved by the outward act. 
Exactly the same act may be perfect or imperfect, according to 
the spirit of the doer. The same language of indignation against 
the wicked which issues from our Lord's mouth might be uttered 
by an imperfect good man who mixed human frailty with the 
emotion."^ The importance of miracles as the counterpart and 
complement of evidence of a different nature is not questioned. 
It is not denied, that if, by proof, demonstration is meant, such 
proof of the sinlessness of Jesus is precluded. Reasoning on such 
a matter is, of course, probable. Nevertheless, it may be fully 
convincing. On the same species of reasoning is the belief in the 
testimony to miracles founded. How do we judge, respecting 
any one whom we well know, whether he possesses one trait of 
character, or lacks another? How do we form a decided opinion, 
in many cases, with regard to the motives of a particular act, or in 
respect to his habitual temper? It is by processes of inference 
precisely similar to those by which we conclude that Jesus was 
pure and holy. There are indications of perfect purity and holi- 
ness which exclude rational doubt upon the point. There are 
phenomena, positive and negative, which presuppose faultless 
perfection — which baffle explanation on any other hypothesis. 
If there are facts which it is impossible to account for, in case 
moral fault is conceived to exist, then the existence of moral fault 
is disproved. 

The virtue of Jesus, be it observed, was not an innocence which 
was not tried by temptation, a virtue not tested in contact with 
solicitations to evil. The story of the temptations that assailed 
Jesus at the outset of his ministry is a picture of enticements that 
could not be escaped in the situation in which he was placed. 
To use for his own personal comfort and advantage the power 
given of God for ends wholly unselfish, to presume on the favor 
and miraculous protection of God, by rash and needless exposure 
to perils, by adopting means, not consonant with the divine plan 
and will, with a view to secure a rapid attainment of the end 
1 Mozley, Lectures on Miracles, p. ii. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 153 

set before him, the building up of the kingdom of righteousness 
on earth — such were the temptations thrust in his way at the 
beginning, and through the entire period of his contact with the 
popular demands and expectations. The perfection of his char- 
acter was the result of an unerring resistance to specious allure- 
ments, which continued to the last. When the final test was 
reached, his words, which had been the voice of his soul from 
the outset, were, " Not my will, but thine, be done." ^ 

It may be thought that we are at least incapable of proving the 
sinlessness of Jesus until we have first established the ordinary 
belief as to the origin of the Gospels. This idea is also a mistake. 
Our impression of the character of Christ results from a great 
number of incidents and conversations recorded of him. The 
data of the tradition are miscellaneous, multiform. If there had 
been matter, which, if handed down, would have tended to an 
estimate of Jesus in the smallest degree less favorable than is 
deducible from the tradition as it stands, who was competent, 
even if anybody had been disposed, to ehminate it? What dis- 
ciples, earlier or later, had the keenness of moral discernment 
which would have been requisite in order thus to sift the evangelic 
narrative? Something, to say the least, — some words, some 
actions, or omissions to act, — would have been left to stain the 
fair picture. Moreover, the conception of the character of Jesus 
which grows up in the mind on a perusal of the gospel records has 
a unity, a harmony, a unique individuaHty, a verisimilitude. This 
proves that the narrative passages which call forth this image in 
the reader's mind are substantially faithful. The characteristics 
of Jesus which are collected from them must have belonged to an 
actual person. 

In an exhaustive argument for the sinlessness of Jesus, one 
point would be the impression which his character made on others. 
What were the reproaches of his enemies? If there were faults, 
vulnerable places, his enemies would have found them out. But 
the offences which they laid to his charge are virtues. He asso- 
ciated with the poor and with evil-doers. But this was from love, 
and from a desire to do them good. He was willing to do good 
on the sabbath ; that is, he was not a slave to ceremony. He 
honored the spirit, not the letter, of law. He did not bow to the 
authority of pretenders to superior sanctity. Leaving out of view 

^ Luke xxii. 42. 



154 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

his claim to be the Christ, we cannot think of a single accusation 
that does not redound to his credit. There is no reason to dis- 
trust the evangeUc tradition, which tells us that a thief at his side 
on the cross was struck with his innocence, and said, " This man 
hath done nothing amiss." The centurion exclaimed, " Truly, 
this was a righteous man ! " Since the narratives do not conceal 
the insults offered to Jesus by the Roman soldiers, and the taunts 
of one of the malefactors, there is no ground for ascribing to 
invention the incidents last mentioned. But what impression as to 
his character was made on the company of his intimate associ- 
ates ? They were not obtuse, unthinking followers. They often 
wondered that he did not take a different way of founding his 
kingdom, and spoke out their dissatisfaction. They were not 
incapable observers and critics of character. Peculiarities that 
must have excited their surprise, they frankly related ; as that he 
wept, was at times physically exhausted, prayed in an agony of 
supplication. These circumstances must have come from the 
original reporters. It is certain, that, had they marked anything 
in Jesus which was indicative of moral infirmity, the spell that 
bound them to him would have been broken. Their faith in him 
would have been dissolved. It is certain that in the closest asso- 
ciation with him, in private and in public, they were more and 
more struck with his blameless excellence. One of the most 
convincing proofs of the perfect soundness of his moral judgment 
and of its absolute freedom from personal bias, such even as an 
unconscious influence of personal affection, as well as of his 
unshrinking fidehty, is seen in his faithful dealing with his devoted 
and beloved Disciples. Ready to pardon their deviations from 
right under the pressure of temptation, his relation to them, even 
to the most zealous of his followers, subtracted not an iota from 
the pointed rebuke which he saw to be merited and for their 
own good required. They parted from him at last with the 
unanimous, undoubting conviction that not the faintest stain of 
moral guilt rested on his spirit. He was immaculate. This was 
a part of their preaching. Without that conviction on their part, 
Christianity never could have gained a foothold on the earth. 

There is not room here to dwell on that marvellous unison of 
virtues in the character of Jesus, — virtues often apparently con- 
trasted. It was not piety without philanthropy, or philanthropy 
without piety, but both in the closest union. It was love to God 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 1 55 

and love to man, each in perfection, and both forming one spirit. 
It was not compassion alone, not disunited from the sentiment of 
justice ; nor was it rectitude, austere, unpitying. It was compas- 
sion and justice, the spirit of love a?id the spirit of truth, neither 
clashing with the other. There was a deep concern for the soul 
and the life to come, but no cynical indifference to human suffer- 
ing and well-being now. There was courage that quailed before 
no adversary, but without the least ingredient of reckless daring, 
and observant of the limits of prudence. There was a dignity 
which needed no insignia to uphold it, yet was mixed with a sweet 
humility. There was rebuke for the proudest, a relentless un- 
masking of sanctimonious oppressors of the poor, and the 
gentlest words for the child, the suffering invalid, the penitent 
evil-doer. There was a deep concern for the good of large bodies 
of men, for the nation, for the race of mankind, yet a heartfelt 
affection for the single family, a tender interest in the humblest 
individual, even when unworthy. 

There is one fact which ought to dispel every shadow of doubt 
as to the absolute sinlessness of Jesus. Let this fact be seriously 
pondered. He was utterly free from self-accusation, from the 
consciousness of fault ; whereas, had there been a failure in duty, 
his sense of guilt would have been intense and overwhelming. 
This must have been the case had there been only a single lapse, 
— one instance, even in thought, of infidelity to God and con- 
science. But no such oftence could have existed by itself; it 
would have tainted the character. Sin does not come and dis- 
appear, like a passing cloud. Sin is never a microscopic taint. 
Sin is self-propagating. Its first step is a fall and the beginning 
of a habit. We reiterate that a consciousness of moral defect 
in such an one as we know that Jesus was, and as he is universally 
conceded to have been, must infallibly have betrayed itself in the 
clearest manifestations of conscious guilt, of penitence, or of 
remorse. The extreme delicacy of his moral sense is perfectly 
obvious. His moral criticism goes down to the secret recesses of 
the heart. He demands, be it observed, se/f-]\idgment : " First 
cast the beam out of f/iine own eye;" "Judge not." His con- 
demnation of moral evil is utterly unsparing ; the very roots of it 
in illicit desire are to be extirpated. He knows how sinful men 
are. He teaches them all to pray, " Forgive us our debts " ; yet 
there is not a scintilla of evidence that he ever felt the need of 



156 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

offering that prayer for himself. From beginning to end there is 
not a lisp of self-blame. He prays often, he needs help from 
above ; but there is no confession of personal unworthiness. Men 
generally are reminded of their sins when they are overtaken by 
calamity. The ejaculations of Jesus in the presence of his inti- 
mate associates, when he was sinking under the burden of mental 
sorrow, are transmitted, — and there is no sign whatever of a dis- 
position on the part of disciples to cloak his mental experiences, 
or misrepresent them, — but not the slightest consciousness of 
error is betrayed in these spontaneous outpourings of feeling. 
" His was a piety with no consciousness of sin, and no expression 
of repentance."^ 

Let the reader contrast this unbroken peace of conscience with 
the self-chastisement of an upright spirit which has become alive 
to the obhgations of divine law, — the same law that Jesus in- 
culcated. " Oh, wretched man that I am ! " No language short 
of this outcry will avail to express the abject distress of Paul. 
There are no bounds to his self-abasement ; he is " the chief of 
sinners." The burden of self-condemnation is too heavy for such 
conscientious minds to carry. Had the will of Jesus ever suc- 
cumbed to the tempter, had moral evil ever found entrance into 
his heart, is it possible that his humiliation would have been less, 
or less manifest? That serene self-approbation would have fled 
from his soul. He would have partaken of the spirit which he 
depicted in the penitent Publican. Had the Great Teacher, 
whose words are a kind of audible conscience ever attending us, 
and are more powerful than anything else to quicken the sense 
of obligation — had he so little moral sensibility as falsely to 
acquit himself of blame before God? It is psychologically im- 
possible that he should have been blameworthy without knowing 
it, without feeling it vividly, and without exhibiting compunction, 
or remorse and shame, in the plainest manner. There was no 
such consciousness, there was no such expression of guilt. There- 
fore he was without sin. 

We have said that there is nothing in the evangelic tradition to 
imply the faintest consciousness of moral evil in the mind of 
Jesus. A single passage has been by some falsely construed as 
containing such an implication. It may be worth while to notice 
it. To the ruler who inquired what he should do to secure eternal 
1 W. M. Taylor, The Gospel Miracles, etc., p. 50. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 157 

life, Jesus is said to have answered, "Why callest thou me good? 
there is none good but one, that is God." ^ There is another 
reading of the passage in Matthew, which is adopted by Tischen- 
dorf : " Why askest thou me concerning the good? There is one," 
etc.^ This answer is not unsuitable to the question, " What good 
thing shall I do?" It points the inquirer to God. It is fitted to 
suggest that goodness is not in particular doings, but begins in a 
connecting of the soul with God. We cannot be certain, however, 
whether Jesus made exactly this response, or said what is given in 
the parallel passages in Mark and Luke. If the latter hypothesis be 
correct, it is still plain that his design was simply to direct the 
inquirer to God, whose will is the fountain of law. He disclaims 
the epithet "good," and applies it to God alone, meaning that 
God is the primal source of all goodness. Such an expression is 
in full accord with the usual language of Jesus descriptive of his 
dependence on God. The goodness of Jesus, though without 
spot or flaw, was progressive in its development ; and this dis- 
tinction from the absolute goodness of God might justify the 
phraseology which he employed.^ The humihty of Jesus in his 
reply to the ruler was far enough from that of an offender against 
the divine law. Its ground was totally diverse. 

There is a single occurrence narrated in the fourth Gospel, 
which may be appropriately referred to in this place.^ Jesus said, 
"I go not up to this feast: " the "yet" in both the Authorized 
and the Revised Versions probably forms no part of the text. 
" But when his brethren were gone up, then went he also up, not 
openly, but, as it were, in secret." Can anybody think that the 
author of the Gospel, whoever he was, understands, and means 
that his readers shall infer, that the first statement to the brethren 
was an intentional untruth? It is possible that new considerations, 
not mentioned in the brief narration, induced Jesus to alter his 
purpose. This is the opinion of Meyer.^ He may have waited, 
as on certain other occasions, for a divine intimation, which came 
sooner than it was looked for.^ " My time," he had said to his 

1 Matt. xix. 17, cf. Mark x. 18; Luke xviii. 19. 
^ tL fj^ ipiaras irepl tov dyadov ; 

* See Weiss, Matth'dusevangelmm^ ad loc; Biblische TheoL, p. 71. 

* John vii. 8, 10, 14. * Evang. Johayinis, ad loc. 

^ Cf. vers. 6, 7, and ii. 4. So Weiss, in Meyer's Ko7}im. iiber das Evang. 
Jokann.y ad loc. 



158 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

brethren, *'is not yet full come." It was perhaps signified to him 
that he could go to Jerusalem without then precipitating the crisis. 
He had felt that to accompany the festal caravan would be to make 
prematurely a public demonstration adapted to rouse and combine 
his adversaries. In fact, he did not show himself at Jerusalem 
until the first part of the feast was over. It is not unlikely that 
he travelled over Samaria. 

One of the Evangelists relates that, on a certain occasion, when 
he was indirectly prompted by his mother to work a miracle, he 
said, " Woman, what have I to do with thee ? ^ Mine hour is not 
yet come." It was only a prompting from above, no suggestion 
from a human source, which he could heed in a matter of this 
kind. In the same spirit the Disciples were told that there was a 
bond of loyalty more sacred than regard for the nearest and dear- 
est relatives.^ As to the designation, " Woman," it implies not 
the least coldness of feehng. The same EvangeHst tells us that 
so Jesus addressed his mother from the cross when he committed 
her to the tender care of his Follower.^ So, also, he designated 
Mary Magdalene when she was weeping at the tomb.* 

Complaints have been made of the severity of his denunciation 
of the Pharisees. It is just these passages, however, and such as 
these, which free Christianity from the stigma cast upon it by the 
patronizing critics who style it " a sweet Galilean vision," and find 
in it nothing but a solace " for tender and weary souls." ^ It is no 
fault in the teaching of Jesus that in it righteousness speaks out in 
trumpet-tones. There is no unseemly passion, but there is no sen- 
timentalism. Hypocrisy and cruelty are painted in their proper 
colors. That retribution is in store for the iniquity which steels 
itself against the incentives to reform is a part of the Gospel which 
no right-minded man would wish to blot out. It is a truth too 
clearly manifest in the constitution of things, too deeply graven 
on the consciences of men. The spotless excellence of Jesus 
needs no vindication against criticism of this nature. 

Were it possible to believe, that, apart from the bhnding, mis- 
leading influence of a perverse character, so monstrous an idea 
respecting himself — supposing it to be false — gained a lodge- 
ment in the mind of Jesus, the effect must have been a steady, 
rapid moral deterioration. False pretensions, the exaggeration of 

1 John ii. 4. 2 Luke xiv. 26 ; Matt. xix. 29. ^ John xix. 26. 

^ Ibid.^y^. 15. ^ See Renan, English Conferences, z.x\^ passim. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION 159 

personal claims, even when there is no deliberate insincerity in the 
assertion of them, distort the perceptions. They engender pride 
and other unhealthy passions. The career of Mohammed from 
the time when he set up to be a prophet illustrates the downward 
course of one whose soul is possessed by a false persuasion of this 
sort. When the bounds that limit the rank and rights of an indi- 
vidual in relation to his fellow-men are broken through, degeneracy 
of character follows. His head is turned. He seeks to hold a 
sceptre that is unlawfully grasped, to exercise a prerogative to 
which his powers are not equal. Simplicity of feeling, self-re- 
straint, respect for the equal rights of others, genuine fear of God, 
gradually die out. 

If it be supposed that Jesus, as the result of morbid enthusiasm, 
imagined himself the representative of God and the Lord and 
Redeemer of mankind, experience would have dispelled so vain 
a dream. It might, perhaps, have been kept alive in the first flush 
of apparent, transient success. But defeat, failure, desertion by 
supporters, will often awaken distrust, even in a cause which is 
true and just. How would it have been with the professed Mes- 
siah when the leaders in Church and State poured derision on his 
claims ? How would it have been when his own neighbors, among 
whom he had grown up, chased him from the town ? how when the 
people who had flocked after him for a while, turned away in dis- 
belief, when his own disciples betrayed or denied him, when ruin 
and disgrace were heaped upon his cause, when he was brought 
face to face with death ? How would he have felt when the crown 
of thorns was placed on his head ? when, in mockery, a gorgeous 
robe was put on him ? What an ordeal to pass through was that ! 
Would the dream of enthusiasm have survived all this? Would 
not this high-wrought self-confidence have collapsed ? Savonarola, 
when he stood in the pulpit of St. Mark's, with the eager multitude 
before him, and was excited by his own eloquence, seemed to him- 
self to foresee, and ventured to foretell, specific events. But in 
the coolness and calm of his cell he had doubts about the reality 
of his own power of prediction. Hence, when tortured on the 
rack, he could not conscientiously affirm that his prophetic utter- 
ances were inspired of God. He might think so at certain mo- 
ments ; but there came the ordeal of sober reflection, there came 
the ordeal of suffering ; and under this trial his own faith in him- 
self was to this extent dissipated. 



l6o THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The depth and sincerity of the conviction which Jesus enter- 
tained respecting himself endured a test even more severe than 
that of an ignominious failure, and the pains of the cross. He 
saw clearly that he was putting others in mortal jeopardy.-^ The 
same ostracism, scorn, and malice awaited those who had attached 
themselves to his person, and were prominently identified with his 
cause. Their families would cast them off; the rulers of Church 
and State would harass them without pity ; to kill them would be 
counted a service rendered to God. A man must be in his heart 
of hearts persuaded of the justice of a cause before he can make 
up his mind to die for it ; but, if he have a spark of right feeling 
in him, he must be convinced in his inmost soul before he con- 
sents to involve the innocent and trustful follower in the destruc- 
tion which he sees to be coming on himself. It must not be 
forgotten, that, from the beginning of the public life of Jesus to 
his last breath, the question of the reality of his pretensions was 
definitely before him. He could not escape from it for a moment. 
It was thrust upon him at every turn. The question was, should 
men believe in him. The strength of his belief in himself was 
continually tested. It was a subject of debate with disbelievers. 
On one occasion — the historical reality of the occurrence no one 
doubts — he called together his disciples, and inquired of them 
what idea was entertained respecting him by the people.^ He 
heard their answer. Then he questioned them concerning their 
own conviction on this subject. One feels that his mood could 
not be more calm, more deliberate. The declaration of faith by 
Peter he pronounces to be a rock. It is an immovable founda- 
tion, on which he will erect an indestructible community. If 
Jesus persevered in the assertion of a groundless pretension, it was 
not for the reason that it was unchallenged. It was not cher- 
ished because nobody was anxious to disprove it or few inclined 
to dispute it. He was not led to maintain it from want of re- 
flection. 

The foregoing considerations, it is believed, are sufficient to 
show that the abiding conviction in the mind of Jesus respecting 
his own mission and authority is inexplicable, except on the sup- 
position of its truth. There was no moral evil to cloud his self- 
discernment. The bias of no selfish impulse warped his estimate 

1 Matt. X. 17, 18, 36; Mark x. 39; John xvi. 2. 

2 Matt. xvi. 13-21. 



JESUS CONSCIOUS OF HIS DIVINE MISSION l6l 

of himself. His conviction respecting his calUng and office re- 
mained unshaken under the severest trials. 

11. The sinlessness of Jesus in its probative force is equivalent to 
a miracle ; it establishes his supernatural mission ; it proves his 
exceptional relation to God. 

We are now to contemplate the perfect holiness of Jesus from 
another point of view, as a proof on a level with miraculous events, 
and as thus directly attesting his claims, or the validity of his con- 
sciousness of a unique, immediate connection with God. 

Sin is the disharmony of the will with the law of universal love. 
This law is one in its essence, but branches out in two directions, 
— as love supreme to God, and equal or impartial love to men. 
We have no call in this place to investigate the origin of sin. It 
is the universality of sin in the world of mankind which is the 
postulate of the argument. Sin varies indefinitely in kind and 
degree. But sinfulness in its generic character is an attribute of 
the human family. A human being old enough to be conscious 
of the distinction of right and wrong in whom no distinct fault of 
a moral nature is plainly discernible is rarely to be found. There 
may be here and there a person whose days have been spent in 
the seclusion of domestic life, under Christian influences, without 
any such explicit manifestation of evil as arrests attention and calls 
for censure. Occasionally there is a man in whom, even though 
he mingles in the active work of life, his associates find nothing to 
blame. But, in these extremely infrequent instances of lives with- 
out any apparent blemish, the individuals themselves who are thus 
remarkable are the last to consent to the favorable verdict. That 
sensitiveness of conscience which accompanies pure character rec- 
ognizes and deplores the presence of sin. If there are not positive 
offences, there are defects ; things are left undone which ought to 
be done. If there are no definite habits of feeling to be con- 
demned, there is a conscious lack of a due energy of holy prin- 
ciple. In those who are deemed, and justly deemed, the most 
virtuous, and in whom there is no tendency to morbid self-depre- 
ciation, there are deep feelings of penitence. " If we say that we 
have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."^ 
This is quoted here, not as being an authoritative testimony, but 
as the utterance of one whose standard of character was obviously 

1 I John i. 8. 

M 



1 62 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the highest. With such an ideal of human perfection, the very 
thought that any man should consider himself sinless excites indig- 
nation. One who pronounces himself blameless before God proves 
that falsehood, and not truth, governs his judgment. 

What shall be said, then, if there be One of whom it can truly 
be affirmed, that every motive of his heart, not less than every 
overt action, was fully conformed to the loftiest ideal of excel- 
lence, — One in whom there was never the faintest self-condemna- 
tion, or the least ground for such an emotion ? There is a miracle ; 
not, indeed, on the same plane as miracles which interrupt the 
customary sequences of natural law. It is an event in another 
order of things than the material sphere. But it is equally an 
exception to human experience. It is equally to all who discern 
the fact a proclamation of the immediate presence of God. It is 
equally an attestation that he who is thus marked out in distinc- 
tion from all other members of the race bears a divine commission. 
There is an exception to the uniform course of things. Such a 
phenomenon occasions no less wonder than the instantaneous 
cure, by a word, of a man born blind. 

On this eminence he stands who called himself the Son of man. 
It is not claimed that this peculiarity of perfect holiness proves of 
itself the divinity of Jesus. This would be a larger conclusion than 
the premises justify. But the inference is unavoidable, first, that 
his relation to God is altogether peculiar, and secondly, that his 
testimony respecting himself has an attestation akin to that of a 
miracle. That testimony must be on all hands allowed to have 
included the claim to be the authoritative Guide and the Saviour 
of mankind ; to be the Son of God in such a sense as to include 
the truth, and not this truth alone, that "none but the Father 
knoweth the Son ; neither doth any know the Father, save the 
Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him."^ 

1 Matt. xi. 27. 



CHAPTER VIII 

MIRACLES : THEIR NATURE, CREDIBILITY, AND PLACE IN CHRISTUN 

EVIDENCES 

Christianity from the first has been declared to have a supernat- 
ural origin and sanction.^ It is certain that the apostles denied 
that the religion which they were promulgating was the work of 
man, or that its distinctive worth was owing to created causes or 
agents. That Jesus preceded them in this declaration is equally 
certain. At the same time, the prior revelation of God in Nature 
and Providence was not ignored or lightly esteemed. Its compar- 
ative failure to produce its legitimate effect was attributed to the 
power of evil to dull the sense of the supernatural. Yet the dis- 
content, self-accusation, and vague yearning for a lost birthright, 
which move men to hearken to the Christian revelation, are attrib- 
uted to the influence of the earlier revelation in the material crea- 
tion and in conscience. 

Nor is there any inconsistency between the two revelations. 
Christianity is in part a republication of truth respecting God and 
human duties — truth which the light of Nature, were reason not 
clouded, would of itself disclose. Virtues of character which 
have shed lustre on individuals or communities that have had no 
knowledge of Christianity, correspond in no small degree to the 
precepts of Christianity. The difference, as already pointed out, 
is that in Christian teaching such duties are ingrafted on new 
motives, are connected with more potent incentives, and come 
home to the heart and conscience with a force of appeal not felt 

^ The term " supernatural " is used here, and occasionally elsewhere on 
these pages, as a matter of convenience, despite the fact that erroneous ideas 
are liable to be associated with it. The term serves to distinguish what it is 
used to denote from the customary sequences of physical and mental phenom- 
ena collectively considered, but not as implying that these are not equally in 
their origin, supernatural, i.e. produced by the will and power of God. Strictly 
speaking, the " natural " is " supernatural," and vice versa. 

163 



1 64 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

before. But the chief end of Christianity lies beyond that which 
it has in common with natural religion. The purpose is to bring 
men into a state of reconciliation and filial connection with God, and 
to plant on the earth a kingdom of righteousness and peace. For 
such an achievement more is needed than communications of 
abstract truth. The events which form the groundwork of Chris- 
tianity are such as to awaken a living perception of the character 
of God and to impress the soul with a sense of his personal pres- 
ence and agency. The doctrinal part of the Scriptures of both 
the Old and New Testament is a growth upon an underlying foun- 
dation of facts. Doctrine illuminates that history wherein, from 
age to age, the just and merciful God had manifested himself to 
men. 

When this view is taken of the Gospel, it no longer wears the 
appearance of being an afterthought of the Creator. Revelation 
is inwoven with phenomena which form an integral part of the his- 
tory of mankind. That history is a connected whole. As such, 
Christianity is the realization of an eternal purpose. In this light 
it is regarded by the writers of the New Testament. To be sure, 
inasmuch as sin is no part of the creation, but is the perverse act of 
the creature, and since the consequences of sin in the natural order 
are thus brought in, it may be said with truth that redemption is 
the remedy of a disorder. It may be truly affirmed that Revela- 
tion, in the forms which it actually assumed, is made possible and 
necessary by the infraction of an ideal order. Only in this sense 
can it be called a provision for an emergency. It was, however, 
none the less preordained. It entered into the original plan of 
human history, conditioned, as features of that plan were, on the 
foreseen fact of sin. The Christian believer finds in the purpose 
of redemption through Jesus Christ the key to the understanding of 
history in its entire compass. 

The historical account of the facts at the basis of the Christian 
Revelation contains in it records of miracles. In the last century 
the design of the miracles of the Gospel was commonly considered 
to be to furnish Christ and the apostles with "credentials" in 
proof of a divine commission to teach. This purpose of the mira- 
cles is not destitute of a sanction in the New Testament Scrip- 
tures.^ But it is not at all a full description of their function. 

1 " If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they 
had not had sin." John xv. 24. The " works " included the miracles. 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 165 

Generally speaking, they are not to be considered appendages, 
but rather constituent elements of Revelation. The miracles of 
healing, especially, which were wrought by Christ, were prompted 
by his desire to reheve suffering. The immediate motive was pity 
for human distress. But these were not wrought upon people in a 
mass, but on individuals, not sought out for the purpose of curing 
their physical disorders. To confer this blessing was not the 
chief end in view. It was subsidiary to the chief purpose, which 
was to impart a spiritual healing. Hence they were done in a 
way to indicate that they were but an element in the self-mani- 
festation of Christ. 

They were to rekindle a dormant faith. They were adapted to 
reenforce a faith that was weak. They were tokens of the super- 
natural. They were, moreover, symbols of the spiritual energy to 
go forth from the Saviour's person and work for the redemption 
of the world. The sign-seeking temper, the unspiritual appetite 
for marvels for their own sake, the disposition to see nowhere, 
except in displays of power, evidence of God's presence and of 
his own mission from God, the demand for an astounding sign 
from heaven, Jesus rebuked. But this is all. " The Jesus Christ 
presented to us in the New Testament would become a very dif- 
ferent person if the miracles were removed."^ " The character of 
Jesus," to quote the words of Horace Bushnell, " is ever shining 
with and through them, in clear self-evidence, leaving them never 
to stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering them with 
glory, as tokens of a heavenly love, and acts that only suit the 
proportions of his personal greatness and majesty." ^ 

Before considering the subject of the credibility of the miracles 
recorded in the New Testament, something should be said on the 
question whether or not miracles are possible. Denial or doubt 
on this last point results from an untheistic conception of Nature, 
and the relation of Nature to God. Or, if the personaHty of God 
is recognized, he is conceived of as exterior to the world, either a 
passive spectator or acting upon it from without. The notion of 
Nature is that of a machine, having its springs of motion within 
itself — a closed aggregate of forces which operates in a mechanical 
way. It is inferred that a miracle, were it to occur, would be an 
irruption into this complex mechanism. Such has been the idea 

^ Dr. Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury), The Relations between Religion 
and Science, p. 209. 2 Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 364. 



1 66 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

of Deism, and something like it has too often been impUed in the 
language of Christian theologians. When it is understood that 
God, transcendent and personal though he be, is Hkewise imma- 
nent in Nature, and that Nature and the interaction of its parts 
are dependent on his unceasing energy, the difficulty vanishes. 
Science, no more than religion, warrants us in assuming the exist- 
ence of " forces " in Nature, which form an independent totality. 
In fact, the drift of science is toward the unification of " forces." 
"The whole course of Nature," says Lotze, "becomes intelligible 
only by supposing the coworking (^Mitwirkung) of God, who alone 
carries forward {vermitteli) the reciprocal action of the different 
parts of the world. But that view which admits a life of God that 
is not benumbed in an unchangeable sameness, will be able to 
understand his eternal coworking as a variable quantity, the trans- 
forming influence of which comes forth {hervortriti) at particular 
moments and attests that the course of Nature is not shut up 
within itself. And this being the case, the complete conditioning 
causes of the miracle will be found in God and Nature together, 
and in that eternal action and reaction between them, which 
although perhaps not ordered simply according to general laws, is 
not void of regulative principles. This vital, as opposed to a 
mechanical, constitution of Nature, together with the conception 
of Nature as not complete in itself — as if it were dissevered 
from the divine energy — shows how a miracle may take place 
without any disturbance elsewhere of the constancy of Nature, 
all whose forces are affected sympathetically, with the conse- 
quence that its orderly movement goes on unhindered."^ 

Much that has been written, in recent decades, under the name 
of natural " science " contains in it an admixture of metaphysics 
which belongs, if it could claim a foothold anywhere, to philosophy 
and not to natural or physical science as such. Hence it cannot 
plead the authority conceded to those who teach science properly 
so called. What is meant by "Nature"? what is matter? what 
is "force"? what does the term "law," and the phrase "laws of 
Nature," signify? We enter here into no prolonged investigation 

^ Lotze, Mikrokosmos, 4th ed., vol. ill. p. 364. The principle of the con- 
servation of energy has nothing to say of the sum of energy in the universe, 
or whether there be an unalterable sum. It is, in its proper limits, an 
hypothesis, or best working postulate at present. See Ward, Naturalism and 
Agnosticism^ ii. lecture vi. 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 1 6/ 

of these topics, but it is necessary to remind the reader of the 
trend of the psychical sciences at present, which is due largely to 
the impulse first given by Berkeley, and to the influence of Kant 
and Hegel. Not that the conception of matter which is coming 
into vogue is that of a purely subjective idealism under which the 
percepts of sense have no existence save in the human mind, but 
it is rather that of an objective ideahsm. The " things of sense " 
are to human apprehension real as phenomena, and — whether finite 
minds existed or not — are real as the expression of the ideas and 
the will of God. If it be settled, or if it ever should be, that matter 
is just what the atomic theory describes, then it is the atomic 
world that constitutes the phenomena which are the objects of 
sense-perception. Space, as well as spatial phenomena, is itself 
phenomenal. There is no ground for saying that an inherent 
bond of necessity determines the action of the atoms. This, how- 
ever, is not to make Nature naught but " an aggregate of Divine 
volitions." ^ 

" The natural history of the material world is truly a history of nat- 
ural antecedents which are metaphorically called agents. They are 
to us only signs of their so-called effects. . . . Sensible signs, not 
operative causes, make up the visible world. Nature is a divine sense- 
symbolism adapted to the use of man. Without natural causes there 
could be no humanly calculable, and more or less controllable, course 
of events. But if really to explain an event be to assign its origin and 
final cause, natural science never explains anything ; its province is only 
to discover the divinely established custom followed in the natural suc- 
cession." '■'■After God has been found in the moral experience of man, 
which points irresistibly to intending Will, as the only known Cause 
which is unconditional or originating, the discovery that this is the 
natural or provisional cause of that is recognized as the discovery that 
this is the divinely constituted sign, or constant antecedent of that. 
The whole natural succession is then recognized as a manifestation of 
Personal agency." ^ 

These views render it easy to point out the relation of miracles 
to the observed constancy of Nature. Were the vision not clouded, 
the ordinary sequences of Nature, its wise and beneficent order, 
would manifest its Author, and call out faith and adoration. The 
unexpected departure of Nature from its beaten path serves to 
impress on the minds of men the half-forgotten fact that insepa- 

1 See Appendix, Note lo. 

2 Eraser, Philosophy of Theism^ 2d ed., pp. 131, 193. 



1 68 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

rable from the " forces " of Nature, even in its ordinary movement, 
is the will of God. What are " natural laws " ? They are not 
causes. They exert no power. They are not a code super- 
imposed upon natural objects. They are simply a generalized 
statement of the way in which the objects of Nature are observed 
to act and interact. Thus the miracle does not clash with natural 
laws. It is a modification in the effect due to unusual exertion of 
the voluntary agency which is its cause. If there is a new phenome- 
non, it is the natural consequence of this variation. There is no 
violation of the law of gravitation when a stone is thrown into the air. 
Nature is, within limits, subject to the human will. The intervention 
of man's will gives being to phenomena which no qualities of mat- 
ter, independently of the human agent, would ever produce. Yet 
such effects following upon volition are not said to be violations of 
law. Law describes the action of things in nature when that action 
is not modified and controlled by the voluntary agency back of it. 
If the efficiency of the divine will infinitely outstrips that of the will 
of man, still miracles are as really consistent with natural laws as 
the lifting of a man's hand under the impulse of a volition. This 
obvious fact, it may be added, disproves the statement sometimes 
heard, that a miracle in any one place would destroy the order of 
Nature everywhere. 

If the possibility of miracles is discerned, the next point to 
be settled is that of their credibility. The question whether the 
miracles described in the New Testament, by which it is alleged 
that Christianity was ushered into the world, actually occurred, is 
to be settled by an examination of the evidence. It is an histori- 
cal question, and is to be determined by an application of the 
canons applicable to historical inquiry. The great sceptical phi- 
losopher of the last century displayed his ingenuity in an attempt 
to show that a miracle is from its very nature, and therefore under 
all circumstances, incapable of proof. Hume founds our behef in 
testimony solely on experience. " The reason," he says, " why we 
place any credit in witnesses and historians is not derived from 
any connection which we perceive a priori between testimony and 
reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity be- 
tween them." This is far from being a full account of the origin 
of our behef in testimony. Custom is not the primary source of 
credence. The truth is, that we instinctively give credit to what 
is told us ; that is, we assume that the facts accord with testimony. 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 169 

Experience, to be sure, serves to modify this natural expectation, 
and we learn to give or withhold credence according to circum- 
stances. The circumstance which determines us to believe or 
disbelieve is our conviction respecting the capacity of the witness 
for ascertaining the truth on the subject of his narration and 
respecting his honesty. If we are convinced that he could not 
have been deceived, and that he is truthful, we believe his story. 
No doubt one thing which helps to determine his title to credit is 
the probability or improbability of the occurrences related. The 
circumstance that such occurrences have never taken place before, 
or are " contrary to experience " in Hume's sense of the phrase, 
does not of necessity destroy the credibility of testimony to them. 
An event is not rendered incapable of proof because it occurs, if 
it occurs at all, for the first time. Unless it can be shown to be 
impossible, or incredible on some other account than because it is 
an unexampled event, it may be capable of being proved by wit- 
nesses. Hume is not justified in assuming that miracles are " con- 
trary to experience," as he defines this term. This is the very 
question in dispute. The evidence for the affirmative, as J. S. Mill 
has correctly stated, is diminished in force by whatever weight 
belongs to the evidence that certain miracles have taken place. 
The gist of Hume's argumentation is contained in this remark, 
" Let us suppose that the fact which they [the witnesses] affirm, 
instead of being only marvellous, is really miraculous ; and sup- 
pose, also, that the testimony, considered apart and in itself, 
amounts to an entire proof: in that case, there is proof against 
proof, of which the strongest must prevail," etc. At the best, 
according to Hume, in every instance where a miracle is alleged, 
proof balances proof. One flaw in this argument has just been 
pointed out. The fundamental fallacy of this reasoning is in the 
premises, which base belief on naked " experience " divorced from 
all rational expectations drawn from any other source. The argu- 
ment proceeds on the assumption that a miracle is just as likely 
to occur in one place as in another ; that a miracle whereby the 
marks of truthfulness are transformed into a mask of error and 
falsehood is as likely to occur as (for example) the healing of a 
blind man by a touch of the hand. This might be so if the 
Power that governs the world were destitute of moral attributes. 
" The question is whether the presumption against miracles as mere 
physical phenomena is rebutted by the presumption in favor of 



I/O THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

miracles as works of infinite benevolence." Hume's argument is 
valid only on the theory of Atheism. 

Huxley objects to Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation 
of the order of Nature, " because all we know of the order of 
Nature is derived from our observation of the course of events of 
which the so-called miracle is a part." ^ The laws of Nature, he 
adds, " are necessarily based on incomplete knowledge, and are to 
be held only as grounds of a more or less justifiable expectation." 
He reduces Hume's doctrine, so far as it is tenable, to the canon, 
— " the more a statement of fact conflicts with previous experience, 
the more complete must be the evidence which is to justify us 
in believing it." By " more complete " evidence he apparently 
means evidence greater in amount, and tested by a more searching 
scrutiny. One of the examples which is given is the alleged exist- 
ence of a centaur. The possibility of a centaur, Huxley is far 
from denying, contrary as the existence of such an animal would' 
be to those " generalizations of our present experience which we 
are pleased to call the laws of Nature." Huxley does not deny 
that such events as the conversion of water into wine, and the 
raising of a dead man to life, are within the limits of possibility. 
Being, for aught we can say, possible, we can conceive evidence 
to exist of such an amount and character as to place them beyond 
reasonable doubt. Wherein is Huxley's position on this question 
faulty ? He is right in requiring that no link shall be wanting in 
the chain of proof. He is right in demanding that a mere ^' coin- 
cidence " shall not be taken for an efficacious exertion of power. 
It is certainly possible that a man apparently dead should awake 
simultaneously with a command to arise. If the person who 
uttered the command knew that the death was only apparent, the 
awakening would be easily explained. If he did not know it, and 
if the sleep were a swoon where the sense of hearing is suspended, 
it is still possible that the recovery of consciousness might occur at 
the moment when the injunction to arise was spoken. To be sure, 
it would be a startling coincidence ; yet it might be nothing more. 
But, if there were sufficient reason to conclude that the man had 
passed the limit of possible resuscitation by unaided human 
power, then his awakening at the command of another does not 
admit of being explained by natural causes. The conjunction of 
the return of life and the direction to awake cannot be considered 

^ Huxley's Hume, p. 131. 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES I/I 

a mere coincidence. If other events of the same character take 
place, where the moral honesty of all the persons concerned, and 
other circumstances, exclude mistake as to the facts, the proof of 
miracles is complete and overwhelming. Canon Mozley says : — 

" The evidential function of a miracle is based upon the common 
argument of design as proved by coincidence. The greatest marvel or 
interruption of the order of nature occurring by itself, as the very con- 
sequence of being connected with nothing, proves nothing. But, if it 
takes place in connection with the word or act of a person, that coin- 
cidence proves design in the marvel, and makes it a miracle ; and, 
if that person professes to report a message or revelation from Heaven, 
the coincidence again of the miracle with the professed message of God 
proves design on the part of God to warrant and authorize the 
message."^ 

There is another particular in which Huxley is in error. It is 
plain that if events of the kind referred to, which cannot be due 
to mere coincidence, occur, they call for no revisal of our concep- 
tion of " the order of Nature," if by this is meant the operation of 
so-called " forces," which are ordinarily in exercise within it. Such 
phenomena, it is obvious, might occur as would render the mate- 
rialistic explanation quite irrational. The work done might so far 
surpass the power of its physical antecedents that the ascription 
of it to a purely material agency would be absurd. On the sup- 
position that an occult material agency hitherto undiscovered 
were tenable, we should be driven to the conclusion that the 
person who had become aware of it, and was thus able to give the 
signal for the occurrence of the phenomena, was possessed of 
supernatural knowledge ; and then we should have, if not a mira- 
cle of power, a miracle of knowledge. The answer to Huxley, 
then, is, that the circumstances of an alleged miracle may be such 
as to exclude the supposition either that there is a remarkable 
coincidence merely, or that the order of Nature — the natural sys- 
tem — is in itself different from what has been previously ob- 
served. The circumstances may be such that the only reasonable 
conclusion is the hypothesis of an unusual exertion of divine 
energy, constantly immanent. 

Huxley, like Hume, treats the miracle as an isolated event. He looks 
at it exclusively from the point of view of a naturalist, as if material 
nature were dissevered from God and were the sum of all being and the 

1 Bampton Lectures ^ pp. 5, 6. 



1/2 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

repository of all force. He shuts his eyes to all evidence in its favor 
which it may be possible to derive from its ostensible design and use 
and from the circumstances surrounding it. He shuts his eyes to the 
truth, even to the possible truth, of the being of God. Like Hum.e, he 
contemplates the miracle as a naked marvel. He confines his atten- 
tion to a single quality of the event — its confessed extremely tmusiial 
character. An analogous mode of regarding historical occurrences 
would give an air of improbability to innumerable events that are well 
known to have taken place. If we are told that the enlightened rulers 
of a nation on a certain day deliberately set fire to their capital, and 
consumed its palaces and treasures in the flames, the narrative would 
excite the utmost surprise, if not incredulity. But incredulity vanishes, 
were it added that the capital was Moscow, and that it was held by an 
invading army which certain Russians were willing to make every sacri- 
fice to destroy. Extraordinary actions, whether beneficent or destruc- 
tive, may fail to obtain, or even to deserve, credence, until the motives 
of the actors, and the occasions that led to them, are brought to light. 
The fact of the Moscow fire is not disproved by showing that it could 
not have kindled itself. The method of spontaneous combustion is not 
the only possible method of accounting for such an event. Yet this 
assumption fairly describes Huxley's philosophy on the subject before us. 
Ignoring supernatural agency altogether, Huxley is obliged to ascribe 
miracles, on the supposition that they occur, exclusively, to things in 
Nature, and thus to make them at variance with the order of Na- 
ture as at present understood. They are events parallel to the discov- 
ery of a monstrosity like a centaur. This is an entirely gratuitous 
supposition. A miracle does not disturb our conception of the system 
of Nature. On the contrary, if there were not an ordinary sequence of 
natural phenomena, there could not be a miracle, or, rather, all phenom- 
ena would be alike miraculous. And the pliability of Nature is involved 
in its relation to God.^ 

The " order of Nature " is an ambiguous phrase. It may mean 
that arrangement, or mutual interaction of parts, which constitutes 
the harmony of Nature. The " order of Nature," in the sense of 
" harmony," as Mozley observes, " is not disturbed by a miracle." ^ 
The interruption of a train of relations, in one instance, leaves 
them standing in every other ; i.e. leaves the system, as such, 
untouched." ^ To this it may be added that a miracle is not in- 
harmonious with the comprehensive system which is estabhshed 
and maintained by the Author of Nature, and in which " Nature " 
is but a single department. 

1 On Huxley's philosophy, see Appendix, Note ii. 

2 Bampton Lechires, p. 43. See Lotze's remarks above, p. 166. 
2 See above, p. 168. 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 1 73 

By the " order of Nature " — let it be repeated — is signified 
the stated manner of the recurrence of physical phenomena. On 
this order rests the expectation that things will be in the future as 
they have been in the past, and the belief that they have been as 
they now are. This behef and expectation do not partake in the 
least of the character of necessary truth. The habitual expecta- 
tion that the " order of Nature," embracing the sequences of phe- 
nomena which usually pass under our observation, will be subject 
to no interruption in the future, is capable of being reversed 
whenever proof is furnished to the contrary. The same is true as 
to the course of things in the past. The principles of Theism 
acquaint us with the Cause which is adequate to produce such an 
interruption. The moral condition and exigencies of mankind 
may furnish a sufficient motive for the exertion of this power by 
the merciful Being to whom it belongs. The characteristics of 
Christianity, considered apart from the alleged miracles connected 
with it, predispose the mind to give credit to the testimony on 
which these miracles rest. 

We can hardly expect to understand fiilly the nature of the miracle- 
working power of Christ, the exercise of such a power being foreign to 
our own experience. It may be that in some cases the apparent dis- 
turbance of the ordinary course of Nature was due to a higher physical 
law. The miracle would then consist in the knowledge of this law on 
the part of Christ, and in the coincidence of time with the purpose it 
served in connection with him.^ In certain instances effects were wrought 
by Jesus by the force of his personality, a force not without analogies with- 
in our own observation, which, however, fall too far short of the capacity 
evinced by Jesus, in reference to nervous maladies, to be identified with 
it. In one instance he is said to have been conscious that ''virtue" had 
gone out of him. Generally speaking, faith is at least a moral prerequi- 
site in the reception of the miraculous benefit. It is well to remember 
that in regard to all the circumstances of miracles, the impressions and 
comments of bystanders are not to be considered infallible and taken 
literally. For example, it need not be supposed that dissolution of body 
and spirit had gone so far in Lazarus that the soul had entered on 
a separate, conscious life. Some there are who give full credence to 
miracles wrought upon men. and this in respect to the healing of mala- 
dies otherwise incurable, but hesitate to accept as literal history the 

1 This suggestion, with a wide application of it to the Gospel narratives, is 
made by Dr. Temple, now Archbishop of Canterbury, in The Relations of 
Religion and Science^ pp. 1 94 seq. 



1/4 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

accounts of such miracles in Nature as the multiplying of the loaves. ^ 
One theory is that the occurrences at the basis of these narrations were 
signal acts of Providence (not supernatural), as to which Jesus at the 
moment was inspired with the conviction that they would occur — a feeling 
which, so to speak, he ventured upon. To those about him it seemed 
in the retrospect that they were external miracles. Opposed to this 
theory is the fact that the multiplying of the loaves stands recorded in all 
the Gospels. So in all of them are narrated instances of each of the 
species of miracles wrought upon Nature. The supposition that a few 
of the miracles are symbolical — like parables, a guasi-p'ictor'ml repre- 
sentation of spiritual truths — cannot appeal for support to the example 
of the record of the temptation of Jesus. In this last case, the essen- 
tial fact depicted in the record is one of which the apostles could have 
no personal cognizance. 

The relation of miracles to the eternal proof of divine revela- 
tion merits more particular attention. It has been already re- 
marked that in the last century it was the evidence from miracles 
which the defenders of Christianity principally relied on. The 
work of Paley is constructed on this basis. The argument for 
miracles is placed by him in the foreground ; the testimony in be- 
half of them is set forth with admirable clearness and vigor, and 
objections are parried with much skill. To the internal evidence 
is assigned a subordinate place. This whole method of presenting 
the case has excited in later times misgivings and open dissent. 
Coleridge may be mentioned as one of its earliest censors. The 
contents of Christianity as a system of truth, and the transcendent 
excellence of Christ, have been considered the main evidence of 
the supernatural origin of the Gospel.^ The old method has not 
been without conspicuous representatives, of whom the late Canon 
Mozley is one of the most notable. But, on the whole, it is upon 
the internal argument, in its various branches, that the principal 
stress has been laid, in recent days, in the conflict with doubt and 
disbehef. In Germany, Schleiermacher, whose profound apprecia- 
tion of the character of Jesus is the keynote in his system, held 
that a belief in miracles is not directly involved in the faith of a 
Christian, although the denial of miracles is evidently destructive, 

1 Among the writers of this class are Beyschlag, Das Leben Jesu, i. 303 seq. ; 
Weiss, Leben Jesu ; Bleek, Synoptische Enkl'dming d. drei ersten Evangelien. 

2 In the O. T. (Deut. xiii, 1-6) is a command not to accept a prophet's 
teaching, if it be impious, even if it be sanctioned by signs and wonders, but 
to put him to death. 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 1 75 

as implying such a distrust of the capacity or integrity of the 
apostles as would invalidate all their testimony respecting Christ, 
and thus prevent us from gaining an authentic impression of his 
person and character.^ Rothe, who was a firm believer in the mira- 
cles, as actual historical occurrences, nevertheless maintains that 
the acceptance of them is not indispensable to the attainment of 
the benefits of the Gospel. They were, in point of fact, he tells 
us, essential to the introduction of Christianity into the world : 
the rejection of them is unphilosophical, and contrary to the con- 
clusion warranted by historical evidence. But now that Christ is 
known, and Christianity is introduced as a working power into 
history, it is possible for those who doubt about the miracles to 
receive him in faith, and through him to enter into communion 
with God.2 

There can be no question, that, at the present day, minds which 
are disquieted by doubt, or are more or less disinclined to believe 
in revelation, should first give heed to the internal evidence. It is 
not by witnesses to miracles, even if they stood before us, that 
scepticism is overcome, where there is a lack of any living dis- 
cernment of the peculiarity of the Gospel and of the perfection 
of its author. How can a greater effect be expected from mir- 
acles alleged to have taken place at a remote date, be the proofs 
what they may, than these miracles produced upon those in whose 
presence they were wrought ? Those who undervalue the internal 
evidence, and place their reliance on the argument from miracles, 
forget the declaration of Christ himself, that there are moods of 
disbelief which the resurrection of a man from the dead, when 
witnessed by themselves, would not dispel. They forget the pos- 
ture of mind of many who had the highest possible proof of an 
external nature that miracles were done by him and by the apos- 
tles. Moreover, they fail to consider, that, for the establishment 
of miracles as matters of fact, something more is required than a 
scrutiny such as would suffice for the proof of ordinary occur- 
rences. It is manifest that all those characteristics of Christ and 
of Christianity which predispose us to attribute it to a miraculous 
origin are of weight as proof of the particular miracles said to 
have taken place in connection with it. 

At the same time, miracles, and the proof of miracles from tes- 
timony, cannot be spared. When the peculiarities which distin- 
^ Christl, Glaube, vol. ii. p. 88. 2 ^^^ Dogmatik, p. iii. 



iy6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

guished Christianity from all other religions have impressed the 
mind, when the character of Christ in its unique and supernal 
quality has risen before us in its full attractive power, and when, 
from these influences, we are almost persuaded, at least not a little 
inclined, to believe in the Gospel as a revelation of God, we spon- 
taneously crave some attestation of an objective character. We 
naturally expect, that, if all this be really upon a plane above Na- 
ture, there will be some explicit sign and confirmation of the fact. 
Such attestation being wanting, the question recurs whether there 
may not be, after all, some occult power of Nature to which the 
moral phenomena of Christianity might be traced. Can we be 
sure that we are not still among " second causes" alone, in con- 
tact with a human wisdom, which, however exalted, is still human, 
and not unmingled with error ? Are we certain that we have not 
here merely a flower in the garden of Nature, — a flower, perhaps, 
of unmatched beauty and delicious fragrance, yet a product of the 
earth? It is just at this point that the record of miracles comes 
in to meet a rational expectation, to give their full efl'ect to other 
considerations where the suspicion of a subjective bias may in- 
trude, and to fortify a belief which needs a support of just this 
nature. The agency of God in connection with the origin of 
Christianity is manifested to the senses, as well as to the reason 
and the heart. Not simply a wisdom that is more than human, a 
virtue of which there is no parallel in human experience, a merci- 
ful, renovating influence not referable to any creed or philosophy 
of man's device, make their appeal to the sense of the super- 
natural and divine. Not disconnected from these supernatural 
tokens, but mingling with them, are manifestations of a power 
exceeding that of Nature — a power equally characteristic of God 
and identifying the Author of Nature with the Being of whom 
Christ is the messenger. Strip the manifestation of this ingre- 
dient of power, and an element is lacking for its full effect. The 
other parts of the manifestation excite a willingness to believe, a 
reasonable anticipation that the one missing element is associated 
with them. When this anticipation is verified by answering proof, 
the argument is complete. An inchoate faith rises into an assured 
confidence. It is true that, according to the Gospel histories, Jesus 
deprecated an appetite for displays of miraculous power. When 
the Pharisees challenged him to exhibit a peculiar, overpowering 
proof of his Messiahship, " a sign from heaven," he refused the 



MIRACLES: THEIR PLACE IN CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 1 77 

demand which they made, " tempting him," that is, asking some- 
thing which they knew that he would refuse. The miracles which 
he had performed did not satisfy them.^ There were other than 
miraculous signs of the presence of God and proofs that the Mes- 
siah had come, which it only needed a spiritual discernment to 
perceive. Except for the sake of relieving pain and sorrow, if he 
worked miracles, it was seemingly under a protest. 

The importance of the evidence for miracles, then, does not 
rest solely on the ground, that, if it be discredited, the value of 
the apostles' testimony respecting other aspects of the life of Christ 
is seriously weakened. The several proofs need the miracles as 
a complement in order to give them full efficacy, and to remove 
a difficulty which otherwise stands in the way of the conviction 
which they tend to create. Miracles, it may also be affirmed, 
are component parts of that Gospel which is the object of belief. 
Not only are they parts, and not merely accessories, of the act 
of revelation, they are also comprehended within the work of 
deliverance through Christ — the redemption which is the object 
of the Christian faith. This is evidently true of his resurrection, 
in which his victory over sin was seen in its appropriate fruit, and 
his victory over death was realized — realized, as well as demon- 
strated to man. 

In fine, miracles are the complement of the internal evidence. 
The two sorts of proof lend support each to the other, and they 
conspire together to satisfy the candid inquirer that Christianity 
is of supernatural origin. 

1 Matt. xvi. I ; cf. Mark viii. 1 1 seq. See also Weiss, Leben Jesu^ vol. ii. 
pp. 221 seq. 



N 



CHAPTER IX 

PROOF OF THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST INDEPENDENTLY OF SPECIAL 
INQUIRY INTO THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE GOSPELS 

The reader will bear in mind that we propose to reason, for the 
present, on the basis of views respecting the origin of the Gospels 
which do not clash with those commonly accepted by critics of 
the sceptical schools. Let it be assumed that the traditions which 
are collected in the Gospels of the canon are of unequal value, 
and that all of these books were composed later than the dates 
in the established tradition. Still it is maintained that, even on 
this hypothesis, the essential facts which are related by the 
Evangelists, can be established. In this chapter it is proposed 
to bring forward evidence to prove that miracles were wrought 
by Jesus substantially as related by them. 

I. The fact that the apostles themselves professed to work 
miracles and to do this by a power derived from Christ, makes 
it altogether probable that they believed miracles to have been 
wrought by him. 

The point to be shown is, that narratives of miracles performed 
by Christ were embraced in the accounts which the apostles were 
in the habit of giving of his life. A presumptive proof of this 
proposition is drawn from the circumstance that they themselves, 
in fulfilling the office to which they were appointed by him, pro- 
fessed to work miracles, and considered this an indispensable 
criterion of their divine mission. There is no doubt of the fact 
as here stated. Few scholars now hold that the Epistle to the 
Hebrews was written by Paul. Some follow an ancient opinion, 
which Grotius held, and to which Calvin was inclined, that 
Luke wrote it. Others attribute it to Barnabas. Many are dis- 
posed, with Luther, to consider Apollos its author. It is a ques- 
tion which we have no occasion to discuss here. The date of 
the Epistle is the only point that concerns us at present. It was 
used by Clement of Rome in his Epistle to the Corinthians, and 

178 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 1 79 

therefore must have existed as early as a.d. 97. Zahn, one of 
the latest and most learned scholars who has discussed the 
question, places the date at about a.d. 80.^ Harnack considers 
the probable date to be not far from 65.^ Weiss places it before 
the year 70.^ A large number of critics, including adherents of 
opposite creeds in theology, infer, from passages in the Epistle 
itself, that the temple at Jerusalem was still standing when it was 
written.* Hilgenfeld, the ablest representative of the Tubingen 
school, is of opinion that Apollos wrote it before a.d. 67.^ Be 
this as it may, its author was well qualified to speak of the course 
pursued by the apostles in their ministry.^ Now he tells us that 
their divine mission was confirmed by the miracles which they 
did : " God also bearing them witness, both with signs and won- 
ders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost." ' 
The same thing is repeatedly asserted by the Apostle Paul. 
" Working miracles among you " * is the phrase which he uses 
when speaking of what he himself had done in Galatia. If we 
give to the preposition, as perhaps we should, its literal sense 
" in," the meaning is, that the apostle had imparted to his con- 
verts the power to work miracles.^ In the Epistles to the Romans 
he explicitly refers to " the mighty signs and wonders " which 
Christ had wrought by him : it was by " deed," as' well as by 
word, that he had succeeded in convincing a multitude of brethren.^*' 
How, indeed we might stop to ask, could such an effect have 
been produced at that time in the heathen world by " word " 
alone ? But in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians he reminds 
them that miracles — " signs and wonders and mighty deeds " 
— had been wrought by him before their eyes ; and he calls them 
" the signs," not of an apostle, as the Authorized Version has it, 
but of " the apostle." ^^ They are the credentials of the apostolic 
office. By these an apostle is known to be what he professes 
to be. In working miracles he had exhibited the characteristic 
marks of an apostle. The author of the book of Acts, then, 
goes no farther than Paul himself goes, when that author ascribes 

1 Einl. in d. N. Test, vol. ii. s. 148. ' Ibid., ver. 5. 

2 Chronologie, vol. i. p. 718. 8 ^vepydv dvpdfieis iv vfxiv, Gal. iii. 5. 

3 EinL in d. N. Test., p. 329. ^ Cf. Lightfoot and Meyer, ad loc. 
* See Heb. vii. 9, viii. 3, ix. 4. 10 Rom. xv. 18-20. 

5 Einl. in d. N. Test., p. 388. " 2 Cor. xii. 12. 

^ Heb. ii. 3. 



l80 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

to the apostles " many wonders and signs." ^ It is in the highest 
degree probable, in the light of the passages quoted from Paul, 
that, if he and Barnabas had occasion to vindicate themselves and 
their work, they would declare, as the author of Acts affirms they 
did, "what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the 
Gentiles by them." ^ Now we advance another step. In each 
of the first three Gospels the direction to work miracles is a 
part of the brief commission given by Christ to the apostles.^ If 
the apostles could remember anything correctly, would they 
forget the terms of this brief, momentous charge from the Master? 
This, if anything, would be handed down in an authentic form. 
In the charge when the apostles were first sent out, as it is given 
in Matthew, they were to confine their labors to the Jews — to 
" the lost sheep of the house of Israel." They were not even to 
go at that time to the Samaritans. This injunction is a strong 
confirmation of the exactness of the report in the first Evangelist. 
CoupHng the known fact, that the working of miracles was con- 
sidered by the apostles a distinguishing sign of their office, with 
the united testimony of the first three Gospels, — the Gospels in 
which the appointment of the Twelve is recorded, — it may be 
safely concluded that Jesus did then tell them to " heal the 
sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils." He 
told them to preach, and to verify their authority as teachers by 
this merciful exertion of powers greater than belong to man. Is it 
probable that he expected them to furnish proofs of a kind which 
had not been furnished himself ? Did he direct them to do what 
they had never seen him do ? Did he profess to communicate 
to his apostles a power which he had given them no evidence of 
possessing ? 

II. Injunctions of Jesus not to report his miracles, it is evi- 
dent, are truthfully imputed to him ; and this proves that the 
events to which they relate actually took place. 

It is frequently said in the Gospels, that Jesus enjoined upon 
those whom he miraculously healed not to make it publicly 
known."* He was anxious that the miracle should not be noised 

1 Acts ii. 43, cf. iv. 30, v. 12, xiv. 3. 

2 Ibid., XV. 12, cf, ver. 4. 

3 Matt. X. I, 8; Mark iii. 15; Luke ix. 2; cf. Luke x. 9. 

* Ibid., ix. 30, xii. 16, xvii. 9; Mark iii. 12, v. 43, vii. 36, viii. 26, ix. 9; 
Luke V. 14, viii. 56. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES l8l 

abroad. For instance, it is said in Mark, that in the neighbor- 
hood of Bethsaida he sent home a bUnd man whom he had cured, 
saying, " Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town." ^ 
The motive is plainly indicated. Jesus had to guard against a 
popular uprising, than which nothing was easier to provoke among 
the inflammable inhabitants of Galilee. There were times, it 
costs no effort to believe, when they were eager to make him a 
king.^ He had to conceal himself from the multitude. He had 
to withdraw into retired places. It was necessary for him to re- 
cast utterly the popular conception of the Messiah, and this was 
a slow and well-nigh impossible task. It was a political leader 
and ruler whom the people looked for. It was hard to educate 
even the disciples out of the old prepossession. Hence he used 
great reserve and caution in announcing himself as the Messiah. 
He made himself known by degrees. When Peter uttered his 
glowing confession of faith, Jesus charged him and his compan- 
ions " that they should tell no man of him " ; that is, they should 
keep to themselves their knowledge that he was the Christ.^ The 
interdict against publishing abroad his miracles is therefore quite 
in keeping with a portion of the evangelic tradition that is in- 
dubitably authentic. On the other hand, such an interdict is a 
thing which it would occur to nobody to invent. It is the last 
thing which contrivers of miraculous tales (unless they had be- 
fore them the model of the Gospels) would be likely to imagine. 
No plausible motive can be thought of for attributing falsely such 
injunctions to Jesus, unless it is assumed that there was a desire 
to account for the alleged miracles not being more widely known. 
But this would imply intentional falsehood in the first narrators, 
whoever they were. Even this supposition, in itself most un- 
likely, is completely excluded, because the prohibitions are gen- 
erally said to have proved ineffectual. It is commonly added in the 
Gospels, that the individuals who were healed of their maladies 
did not heed them, but blazed abroad the fact of their miraculous 
cure. Since the injunctions imposing silence are authentic, 
the miracles, without which they are meaningless, must have 
been wrought. It is worthy of note, that, when the maniac of 
Gadara was restored to health, Jesus did not lay this command- 
ment on him. He sent him to his home, bidding him tell his 

^ Mark viii. 26. ^ John vi. 15. * Mark viii. 30; Luke ix. 21. 



1 82 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

friends of his experience of the mercy of God.^ Connected with 
the narratives of miracles, both before and just after in the same 
chapter/ we find the usual charge not to tell what had been 
done. Why not in this instance of the madman of Gadara? The 
reason would seem to have been, that, in that region where Jesus 
had not taught, and where he did not purpose to remain, the 
same danger from publicity did not exist. To be sure, the man 
was not told "to publish" the miracle "in Decapolis," as he 
proceeded to do ; but no pains were taken to prevent him from 
doing this. He was left at liberty to act in this respect as he 
pleased. The Evangelist does not call our attention in any way 
to this peculiarity of the Gadara miracle. It is thus an unde- 
signed confirmation of the truth of the narrative, and at the same 
time of the other narratives with which the injunction to observe 
silence is connected. 

III. Cautions, plainly authentic, against an excessive esteem of 
miracles, are a proof that they were actually wrought. 

No one who falsely sets up to be a miracle- worker seeks to 
lower the popular esteem of miracles. Such a one never chides 
the wonder-loving spirit. The same is equally true of those who 
imagine or otherwise fabricate stories of miracles. The moods 
of mind out of which fictions of this kind are hatched are incom- 
patible with anything like a disparagement of miracles. The 
tendency will be to make as much of them as possible. Now, 
the Gospel records represent Christ as taking the opposite course, 
" Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." ^ This 
implies that there were higher grounds of faith. It is an expres- 
sion of blame. " Believe me that I am in the Father, and the 
Father in me : or else believe me for the very works' sake." * 
That is, if you cannot take my word for it, then let the miracles 
convince you. Under the designation "works," miraculous works 
must have been included.^ It would almost seem, as already 
remarked, that Christ performed his miracles under a protest, 
save as they were called for in order to relieve or to console the 
suffering. He refused to do a miracle where there was not a 
germ of faith beforehand. In the first three Gospels there is the 
same relative estimate of miracles as in the fourth. If men form 

1 Mark v. 19. * /did., xiv. 1 1. 

2 /did., iii. 12, v. 43. ^ As in Matt. xi. 21; Luke x. 13. 
8 John iv. 48. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 183 

an opinion about the weather by the looks of the sky, they ought 
to be convinced by " the signs of the times," in which, if the 
miracles are comprised, it is only as one element in the collective 
manifestation of Christ.^ When the seventy disciples returned 
full of joy that they had not only been able to heal the sick, but 
also to deliver demoniacs from their distress,^ — which had not 
been explicitly promised them when they went forth, — Jesus 
sympathized with their joy. He beheld before his mind's eye the 
swift downfall of the dominating spirit of evil, and he assured the 
disciples that further miraculous power should be given to them. 
But he added, " Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not that the 
spirits are subject unto you ; but rather rejoice, because your 
names are written in heaven." They were not to plume them- 
selves on the supernatural power exercised, or to be exercised, 
by them. They were not to make it a ground of self-congratula- 
tion. These statements of Jesus, be it observed, for the reasons 
stated above, verify themselves as authentic. And they presup- 
pose the reality of the miracles. They show, it may be added, 
that the disciples were trained by Jesus not to indulge a wonder- 
loving spirit, and thus guarded against this source of self-decep- 
tion. 

IV. Teaching of Jesus which is evidently genuine is inseparable 
from certain miracles ; in other words, the miracles cannot be 
dissected out of authentic teaching and incidents with which they 
are connected in the narrative. A few illustrations will prove this 
to be the case. 

I. John the Baptist, being then in prison, sent two of his 
disciples to ask Jesus if he was indeed the Messiah.^ A doubt 
had sprung up in his mind. This is an incident which nobody 
would have invented. In proof of this, it is enough to say that an 
effort has been made, by commentators who have caught up a 
suggestion of Origen, to explain away the fact. It has been con- 
jectured that the message was probably to satisfy some of John's 
sceptical disciples. There is not a syllable in the narrative to 
countenance this view. It is excluded by the message which the 
disciples were to carry from Christ to John, " Blessed is he who- 
soever shall not be offended in me." That is, blessed is the man 

^ Matt. xvi. 3. 

2 Such is the force of the Kal (in the Kal to. Sai/jiSvia, etc.), Luke x. 17. 

8 Matt. xi. 4 ; Luke vii. 22. 



1 84 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

who is not led to disbelieve because the course that I take does 
not answer to his ideal of the Messiah. There is no reason to 
think that John's mind was free from those more or less sensuous 
anticipations concerning Christ and his kingdom which the 
apostles, even after they had long been with Jesus, had not 
shaken off. He had foretold that the Messiah was to have a " fan 
in his hand," was to "gather his wheat into the garner," and 
to " burn up the chaff." ^ He was perplexed that Jesus took no 
more decisive step, that no great overturning had come. Was 
Jesus, after all, the Messiah himself, or was he a precursor? If, 
in his prison there, the faith of John for the moment faltered, it 
was nothing worse than was true of Moses and Elijah, the greatest 
of the old prophets. The commendation of John which Jesus 
uttered in the hearing of the bystanders, immediately after he had 
sent back the disciples, was probably designed to eiface any im- 
pression unfavorable to the Baptist which might have been left on 
their minds. This eulogy is another corroboration of the truth of 
the narrative. The same is true of his closing words, " Notwith- 
standing, he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater 
than he." They suggest the limit of John's insight into the 
nature of the kingdom. It is an unquestionable fact, therefore, 
that the inquiry was sent by John. Nor can it be denied that 
Jesus returned the following answer, " Go and show John again 
those things which ye do hear and see : the blind receive their 
sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf 
hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel 
preached to them." The messengers were to describe to John 
the miracles which Jesus was doing, — Luke expressly adds that 
they themselves were witnesses of them, — and to assure him, that 
in addition to these signs of the Messianic era which Isaiah had pre- 
dicted,^ to the poor the good news of the speedy advent of the king- 
dom were proclaimed. The message of Jesus had no ambiguity. 
It meant what the Evangelists understood it to mean. The idea that 
he was merely using symbols to denote the spiritual effect of his 
preaching is a mere subterfuge of interpreters who cannot otherwise 
avoid the necessity of admitting the fact of miracles. What sort of 
satisfaction would it have given John, in the state of mind in which 
he then was, to be assured simply that the teaching of Jesus was 
causing great pleasure, and doing a great deal of good? The 
1 Matt. iii. 12. 2 jga. xxxv. 5, 6. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 1 85 

same, or almost as much, he knew to be true of his own preach- 
ing. What he needed to learn, and what he did learn from his 
messengers, was, that the miracles of which he had heard were 
really done, and to be reminded of their significance. 

2. The Gospels record several controversies of Jesus with 
over-rigid observers of the sabbath. They found fault with him 
for laxness in this particular. On one occasion he is said to have 
met a reproach of this kind with the retort, " Which of you shall 
have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway 
pull him out on the sabbath day ? " ^ It has been said of the 
books written by the companions of Napoleon at St. Helena, that 
it is not difficult to mark off what he really said, his sayings hav- 
ing a recognizable style of their own. They who maintain that a 
like distinction is to be drawn in the Gospels among the reported 
sayings of Christ have to concede that he uttered the words above 
quoted. They are characteristic words. Even Strauss holds that 
they were spoken by him. If so, on what occasion? Luke says 
that it was on the occasion of Christ's healing a man who had the 
dropsy. There must have been a rescue from so7tie evil. The 
evil must have been a very serious one : otherwise the parable of 
the ox or the ass falling into a pit would be out of place. What 
more proof is wanted of the correctness of the evangelic tradition, 
and thus of the miracle ? On another sabbath he is said to have 
cured a woman, who, from a muscular disorder, had been bowed 
down for eighteen years. His reply to his censors is equally 
characteristic.^ If the reply was made, the miracle that occasioned 
it was done. On still another occasion of the same kind he added 
to the illustration of a sheep falling into a pit the significant ques- 
tion, " How much, then, is a man better than a sheep? " ^ If he 
uttered these words, then he healed a man with a withered hand. 
Unless he had just saved a man from some grievous peril, the ques- 
tion is meaningless. 

3. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke it is related that Jesus was 
charged by the Pharisees with casting out demons through the 
help of Beelzebub their prince.* The conversation that ensued 
upon this accusation is given. Jesus exposed the absurdity of the 
charge. It implied that Satan was working against himself, and 
for the subversion of his own kingdom, " If a house be divided 

1 Luke xiv. 5. 2 /^^v., xiii. 15. 8 Matt. xii. 12. 

* Ibid.^ xii, 22-31; Mark iii. 22-31; Luke xi. 14-23. 



1 86 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

against itself, that house cannot stand." ^ The conversation is 
stamped with internal marks of authenticity. The fact of this 
charge having been made against Christ was inwrought into the 
evangelic tradition. Now, the occasion of the debate was the 
cure of a man who was blind and dumb. The reader may con- 
sider demoniacal possession to be a literal fact, or nothing more 
than a popular idea or theory : in either case the phenomena — 
epilepsy, lunacy, etc. — were what presented themselves to obser- 
vation. It may be said that the Jews had exorcists. Jesus implies 
this when he asks, " By whom do your children " — that is, your 
disciples — "cast them out?" Exorcism as practised even early 
by the Jews is referred to by Josephus.^ Manipulations and dif- 
ferent sorts of jugglery mingled in it. That cases should occur 
in which actual effects should be produced upon credulous per- 
sons is not strange. Yet the cures of this sort which were ef- 
fected by Christ must have included aggravated cases of mental 
and physical disorder, or they must have been wrought with a 
uniformity which distinguished them from similar relief adminis- 
tered by others, sometimes through the medium of prayer and 
fasting. There was an evident contrast between the power ex- 
erted by him in such cases and that with which the Pharisees were 
acquainted. This is implied in the astonishment which this class 
of miracles is represented to have called forth. It is implied, 
also, in the fact that the accusation of a league with Satan was 
brought against him. They had to assert this, or else admit that 
it was " with the finger of God " that he cast out devils.^ " He 
commanded the unclean spirits, and they obeyed him." 

4. We find both in Matthew and Luke a passage in which 
woes are uttered concerning certain cities of Galilee for remaining 
impenitent.^ There is no reason for doubting that they were 
uttered by Jesus. There is a question as to the time when they 
were uttered, unless it be assumed that they were spoken on two 
different occasions ; but that chronological question is immaterial 
here. The authenticity of the tradition is confirmed, if confirma- 
tion were required, by the mention of Bethsaida and Chorazin. 
No account of miracles wrought in these towns is embraced in 
either of the Gospels.^ Had the passage been put into the 

1 Mark iii. 25. 2 Antiquities^ B. viii. c. 2. * Luke xi. 20. 

* Matt. xi. 20-25; Luke x. 13-16. 

fi The Bethsaida of Mark viii. 22 >yas another place, northeast of the lake. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 187 

mouth of Jesus falsely, there would naturally have been framed a 
narrative to match it. There would have stood in connection 
with it a description, briefer or longer, of miracles alleged to have 
been done in those towns. Moreover, " in that same hour," ac- 
cording to the first Gospel, Jesus uttered a fervent thanksgiving 
that the truth, hidden from the wise, had been revealed to the 
simple-hearted,^ — a passage that needs no vindication of its 
authenticity. This outpouring of emotion is a natural sequel to 
the sorrowful impression made on him by the obduracy of the Gal- 
ilean cities. In Luke there is the same succession of moods of 
feeling, although the juxtaposition of the two passages is not quite 
so close. Now, what is the ground of this condemnation of 
Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida? It is "the mighty works" 
which they had witnessed. This privilege makes their guilt more 
heinous than that of Tyre and Sidon. It is the reference to the 
miracles which gives point to the denunciation. 

5. The manner in which faith appears as the concomitant and 
prerequisite of miracles is a strong confirmation of the evangelical 
narratives. Faith is required of the apostles for the performance 
of miraculous works. They fail in the attempt from lack of faith.^ 
They are told, that with faith nothing is beyond their power. 
But it is not their own strength which they are to exert. They 
lay hold of the power of God, and in that power they control the 
forces of Nature. So applicants for miraculous help must come to 
Jesus with faith in his ability to reheve them. The exertion of his 
restorative power is in response to trust. In one place, he " did 
not many mighty works," because of the unbelief there.^ The 
references to faith as thus connected with miracles are numerous. 
They are varied in form, obviously artless and uncontrived. They 
are an undesigned voucher for the truth of the narratives in which 
they mingle.* 

6. In connection with one miracle there is instruction as to 
its design which it is difficult to believe did not emanate from 
Jesus. It is embedded in the heart of the narrative, as it was an 



1 Matt. xi. 25-28. 2 Mark ix. 18; Luke ix. 40. ^ Matt. xiii. 58. 

* See Matt. viii. 10 (Luke vii. 9), ix. 2 (Mark ii, 5; Luke v. 20), ix. 22 
(Mark v. 34, x. 52), xvii. 20 (Luke xvii. 6); Luke viii. 48, xvii. 19; 
Matt. XV. 28; Luke vii. 50, xviii. 42; Mark v. 36, ix. 23; Matt. viii. 13; John 
iv. 50, ix. 38; Acts iii. 16, xiv. 9. 



1 88 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

essential part of the transaction.^ He is in a house at Capernaum 
surrounded by a crowd. A paralytic is brought by four men, and 
is let down through the roof, this being the only means of bringing 
him near Jesus. Seeing their faith, he said tenderly to the para- 
lytic, *'Son (or child), be of good courage : thy sins are forgiven 
thee." The disease, we are led to infer, was the result of sin, it 
may be of sensuaUty. The sufferer's pain of heart Jesus first 
sought to assuage. It was the first step toward his cure. These 
words struck the scribes who heard them as blasphemous. Jesus 
divined their thoughts, and asked them which is the easier to say, 
"Thy sins be forgiven thee," or " Arise and walk"? If one pre- 
supposed divine power, so did the other. Then follows the state- 
ment, " That ye may know that the Son of man hath power on 
earth to forgive sins " — here he turned to the paralytic — " Arise, 
take up thy bed, and go unto thine house." The entire narrative 
is replete with the marks of truth ; but this one observation, de- 
fining the motive of the miracle, making it subordinate to the 
higher end of verifying his authority to grant spiritual blessings, 
carries in it evident marks of authenticity. Did not Jesus say 
this? If he did, he performed the miracle. 

V. We hear it said, and sometimes read in print, that in those 
days " everybody believed in miracles and felt no surprise at their 
occurrence." This is not true. The golden age of the Hebrew 
religion, the period of life and enthusiasm, lay to the Jews of that 
day, with their dry legalism, in the remote past. Its reappearance, 
and with it miracles, were looked for when the Messiah should 
come. The ordinary feeling of surprise at a miracle is expressed 
in the words attributed by one of the EvangeHsts to the Jews, 
" Since the world began it was never heard that any one opened 
the eyes of a man born blind." ^ 

The fact that no miracles are attributed to John the Baptist, 
whom all held to be a prophet, should convince one that the mira- 
cles attributed to Jesus were actually performed. The multitude 
flocked to hear the prophet of the wilderness. Yet he made no 
claim to work miracles, and none were credited to him by his 
own disciples. 

In the Gospels, John is regarded as a prophet inferior to no 
other. His career is described. Great stress is laid on his tes- 
timony to Jesus. Why are no miracles ascribed to him in them ? 

1 Mark ii. lo ; cf. Matt. ix. 6 ; Luke v. 24. 2 John ix. 22. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 1 89 

They would have served to corroborate his testimony. If there 
was a propensity in the first disciples of Christ, or in their successors, 
to imagine miracles where there were none, why are no fabrica- 
tions of this sort interwoven with the story of John's preaching? 
They had before them the life of his prototype, Elijah, and the 
record of the miracles done by him. What (except a regard for 
truth) hindered them from mingling in the story of the forerunner 
of Jesus occurrences equally wonderful? Why do we not read 
that one day he responded to the entreaty of a poor blind man by 
restoring his sight, that on another occasion he gave back to a 
widow the life of her son, that at a certain time a woman who had 
been for years a helpless invalid was immediately cured by a word 
from the prophet, that the diseased were often brought to him by 
their friends to be healed? The only answer is that the Gospel 
narratives are not the product of imagination. They relate the 
events that actually took place. 

VL It is equally difficult for sceptical criticism to explain why 
not a miracle is ascribed to Jesus prior to his public ministry. 
Why should the imagination of the early Christians have stopped 
short at his baptism? Why did not fancy run back, as in the 
later apocryphal fictions, over the period that preceded ? A defi- 
nite date is assigned for the beginning of his miraculous agency. 
Fancy and fraud do not curb themselves in this way. 

VII. The persistence of the faith of the apostles in Jesus as 
the Messiah, and of his faith in himself, admits of no satisfactory 
explanation when the miracles are denied. 

How were the apostles to be convinced that he was the prom- 
ised, expected Messiah? What were the evidences of it? He 
took a course opposite to that which they expected the Messiah 
to take. He planned no poHtical change. He enjoined meek- 
ness and patience. He held out to them the prospect of persecu- 
tion and death as the penalty of adhering to him. Where was 
the national deliverance which they had confidently anticipated 
that the Messiah would effect? How intangible, compared with 
their sanguine hopes, was the good which he sought to impart ! 
Moreover, they heard his claims denied on every side. The 
guides of the people in religion derided or denounced them. 
Had there been no exertions of power to impress the senses, and 
the mind through the senses, it is incredible that the apostles 
could have believed in him, and have clung to him, in the teeth 



1 90 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

of all the influences fitted to inspire distrust. We might ask how 
Jesus himself could have kept on cherishing the unwavering con- 
viction that he was in truth the Messiah of God, if he found him- 
self possessed of no powers exceeding those of the mortals about 
him, powers which had been inseparably connected with the coming 
Messiah. Remembering the miraculous powers of Moses and 
Elijah, could he, if they were denied to him, have maintained this 
consciousness, without the least faltering, especially when he saw 
himself spurned by the rulers, rejected by the people, and at length 
deserted by his timid disciples? 

Strauss is, on the whole, the most prominent writer in modern 
times who has undertaken to reconstruct the Gospel history, leav- 
ing out the miracles. His theory was, that the narratives of mira- 
cles are a mythology spontaneously spun out of the imagination 
of groups of early disciples. But what moved them to build up 
so baseless a fabric ? What was the idea that so possessed the mind 
as to clothe itself with unconscious fancies? Why, at the founda- 
tion of it all, was the fixed expectation that the Messiah must be a 
miracle-worker? The predictions of the Old Testament and the 
example of the prophets required it. How was it, then, that, in 
the absence of this indispensable criterion of the Messianic office, 
these same disciples believed in Jesus ? How came he to believe 
in himself? To these questions the author of the mythical theory 
could give no answer which does not shatter his own hypothesis. 
The same cause which by the supposition impelled to the imagin- 
ing of miracles that were false must have precluded faith, except 
on the basis of miracles that were true. 

Vin. In the evangelical tradition the miracles enter as potent 
causes into the nexus of occurrences. They are links which 
cannot be spared in the chain of events. 

Take, for example, the opening chapters of Mark, which most 
critics at present hold to be the oldest Gospel. There is an 
exceedingly vivid picture of the first labors of Jesus in Capernaum 
and its vicinity. His teaching, to be sure, thrilled his hearers. 
" He taught them as one that had authority."^ But the intense 
excitement of the people was due even more to another cause. In 
the synagogue at Capernaum a demoniac interrupted him with 
loud cries, calling him " the Holy One of God." At the word of 
Jesus, after uttering one shriek, the frenzied man became quiet 

1 Mark i. 22. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 191 

and sane. The mother of Peter's wife was raised from a sick-bed.^ 
Other miraculous cures followed. It was the effect of these upon 
the people that obliged him to rise long before dawn in order to 
anticipate their coming, and to escape to a retired place for 
prayer. It was a miracle wrought upon a leper that compelled 
Jesus to leave the city for "desert places," — secluded spots, 
where the people would not throng upon him in so great numbers.^ 
Very definite occurrences are traced to particular causes, which 
are miraculous acts done by Christ. It was the raising of Lazarus 
and its effect on the people that determined the Jewish rulers to 
apprehend Jesus without delay and to put him to death. The 
fact that this event, in a record which contains so many unmistak- 
ably authentic details, is the point on which the subsequent history 
turns, forced upon Renan the conviction that there was an appar- 
ent miracle, — something that was taken for a miracle, — and 
this conviction he was not able to persuade himself absolutely to 
relinquish.^ 

The miracle at Jericho, which is described, with some diversity 
in the circumstances, by three of the Evangelists, Keim, always 
disposed to discount the miraculous, found it impossible to resolve 
into a fiction.* He refers to the fact that all of the first three Gos- 
pels record it.^ He adverts to the fresh and vivid character of the 
narratives. But the main consideration is the explanation afforded 
of the rising tide of enthusiasm in the people at this time, of which 
there is full proof. But Keim, still reluctant to admit the super- 
natural, alludes to the popular excitement as quickening " the vital 
and nervous forces," and so restoring the impaired or lost vision 
of the man healed. It is intimated that this access of nerve-force, 
coupled with his faith, may have effected the cure. The point 
which concerns us here is the reality of the transaction as it 
appeared to the spectators. The physiological solution may pass 
for what it is worth. If cures had been effected by Jesus in this 
way, no supernatural factor entering into the means, there would 
have been conspicuous failures, as well as instances of success ; and 
how would these failures have affected the minds of the disciples 
and of other witnesses of them, not to speak of the mind of Jesus 

1 Mark i. 30, 31. 2 Jbid., i. 35, v. 45. 

^ Vie de Jesus, 13th ed., pp. 507, 514. 

* Gesch. Jesu von A^azarciy vol. iii. p. 53. 

^ Luke xviii. 35-43, xix. i ; Matt. xx. 29-34 ; Mark x. 46-52. 



192 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

himself? The resurrection of Jesus, more than any other of the 
miracles, bridges over an otherwise impassable chasm in the course 
of events. We see the disciples, an intimidated handful of dis- 
heartened mourners. Then we see them on a sudden transformed 
into a band of bold propagandists of the new faith, eager to avow 
it and ready to lay down their lives for it. The resurrection is the 
event which accounts for this marvellous change and for the spread 
of Christianity which follows. But this event requires to be more 
thoroughly considered. 

IX. The proof of the crowning miracle of Christianity, the res- 
urrection of Jesus, cannot be successfully assailed, even were the 
ordinary views of the sceptical school respecting the origin of the 
Gospels tenable. 

As we stand for the moment on common ground with them, we 
cannot make use of such an incident as the doubt of Thomas and 
the removal of it,^ although this incident, as is conceded respect- 
ing other portions of the fourth Gospel, may be historical, even if 
not John, but another author wrote the book. An uncertainty is 
thrown over the circumstances relating to the intercourse of the 
disciples with Jesus after his death, which are found in the Gos- 
pels. That is, prior to establishing the genuineness of the Gos- 
pels, it is open to question how far the details are faithfully 
transmitted from the witnesses. But, as regards the cardinal fact 
of the Gospel, we have definite evidence from an unimpeachable 
source. The Apostle Paul states with precision the result of his 
inquiries on the subject.^ The crucifixion took place a.d. 29 or 
30. According to the scheme of chronology which is advocated 
by Harnack, Paul was converted a.d. 30. According to the ordi- 
nary view, the event occurred four years after the crucifixion — 
that is, A.D. 34. In a.d. 37 he went to Jerusalem, and staid a fort- 
night with Peter.3 He was conversant with the apostles and other 
disciples. He knew what their testimony was. In the church at 
Corinth there were parties. Some professed to be adherents of 
one apostle, and some of another. There were those, also, who 
doubted the truth of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. 
Paul was interested to show that disbehef on this subject was 
groundless and destructive of the Christian faith, and, incidentally, 
to show his equality with the other apostles, in answer to any who 
might be disposed to call it in question. He enumerates in the 
1 John XX. 24-30. 2 I Cor. xv. 4-8. ^ Gal. ii. 18. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 1 93 

most distinct manner five interviews of the risen Jesus with the 
disciples (independently of the miracle which occurred on the 
journey to Damascus) : the appearance of Jesus to Peter, then 
to "the Twelve," then to five hundred disciples at once, a 
majority of whom were still hving, then to James, then to " all 
the apostles." Last of all, he adds, " He appeared to me 
also." He does not imply that he is giving all the appearances of 
the risen Jesus. He is concerned, for the personal reason men- 
tioned above, to make mention of apostles and to place himself 
in the same category with them. But the appearances which he 
does record are carefully given in chronological order. " James " 
is doubtless James, the brother of the Lord. From Paul's explicit 
statement, and from other perfectly conclusive evidence, it is cer- 
tain that the first of the supposed appearances of Christ to the 
disciples was on the morning of the next Sunday after his death. 
It was on " the third day." ^ Then it was that they beheved them- 
selves to have irresistible proof that he had risen from the tomb. 
This was the principal fact which they proclaimed, the one main 
foundation of their faith and hope. The question is. Were they, 
or were they not, deceived ? Is the Christian Church founded on 
a fact or on a delusion? Did Christianity, which owes its exist- 
ence and spread to this immovable conviction on the part of the 
apostles, spring from either a fraud or a dream ? The notion which 
once had advocates, that Christ did not really die, but revived from 
a swoon, is given up. How could he have gone through the cruci- 
fixion without dying? What would have been his physical condi- 
tion, even if a spark of Hfe had remained? If he did not die 
then, when did he die? Did he and the apostles agree to pretend 
that he had died ? The slander of the Jews, that some of the dis- 
ciples stole his body, nobody will for a moment credit. Why 
should men make up a story which was to bring them no benefit, 
but only contempt, persecution, and death ? The question what 
became of the body of Jesus is one which those who distrust the 
testimony of the apostles do not satisfactorily answer. It is not 
doubted that the tomb was found empty. Jewish adversaries had 
the strongest reason for producing the body if they knew where it 
was. That would have instantly destroyed the apostles* testimony. 

1 I Cor. XV. 4, cf. Matt. xvi. 21, xvii. 23, xx. 19, xxvii. 63, xxviii. I ; Mark 
viii. 31, ix. 31, xiv. 58, xv. 29, xvi. 2, 9 ; Luke ix. 22, xiii. 32, xviii. t^t^, xxiv. 
I, 7, 21, 46 ; John ii. 19, xx. I, 19, 26. 



194 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The only hypothesis which has any plausibiHty at the present day, 
in opposition to the customary faith of Christians, is the " vision- 
theory." The idea of it is, that the apostles mistook mental im- 
pressions for actual perceptions. Their belief in the resurrection 
was the result of hallucination. Of this theory, it is to be said that 
responsibiUty for the supposed delusion, if it was a delusion; comes 
back upon the founder of Christianity himself. Whoever thinks 
that the disciples were self-deceived, not only, as Schleiermacher 
correctly judges, attributes to them a mental imbecility which would 
make their entire testimony respecting Christ untrustworthy, but 
implies that, when Christ chose such witnesses, his judgment was 
strangely at fault. Or, if Christ willingly permitted or led them to 
mistake an inward impression for actual perceptions, he is himself 
the author of error, and forfeits our moral respect.^ But the vision- 
theory is built up on false assumptions, and signally fails to explain 
the phenomena in the case. We need not pause here to examine 
the affirmation of Paul, that he had personally seen Christ. This 
must be observed, that he distinguishes that first revelation of 
Christ to him — which stopped him in his career as an inquisitor, 
and made him a new man in his convictions and aims — from sub- 
sequent " visions and revelations." ^ They were separated in time. 
It was not on them that Paul professed to found his claim to be an 
apostle. He refers to them for another purpose. The words that 
he heard in a moment of ecstasy — whether " in the body or out 
of the body " he could not tell — he never even repeated.^ That 
sight of Jesus which was the prelude of his conversion he gives as 
the sixth and last of his appearances to the apostles : " Last of all 
... he appeared to me also." It was objective, a disclosure to 
the senses. It was such a perception of Christ, that his resurrec- 
tion was proved by it — a fact with which the resurrection of 
believers is declared to be indissolubly connected."* This meant 
more to him than the survival of the soul. It was to be " clothed 
upon" with a spiritual body.^ Nothing less than this does he 
mean when he says of Christ that " he was buried and that he 
was raised." Attempts have been made to account for Paul's con- 
version by referring it to a mental crisis induced by secret misgiv- 
ings, and leanings toward the faith which he was striving to destroy. 

1 Christl. Glaube, vol. ii. p. 88. * I Cor. xv. 12-21. 

2 Cor. xii. I ; i Cor. ii. lo. ^ Compare 2 Cor. v. 3, 4. 
^ 2 Cor. xii. 4 ; cf. Keim, vol. iii. p. 538, n. i. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 195 

Some have brought in a thunder-clap or a sunstroke to help on the 
effect of the struggle supposed to be taking place within his soul. 
One trouble with this psychological explanation of the miracle is, 
that the assumption of previous doubts and of remorseful feelings 
is not only without historical warrant, but is directly in the teeth 
of Paul's own assertions. Inward conflict with evil impulses — con- 
flicts of the '' flesh" with the "spirit" — were something quite differ- 
ent from such misgivings. It is not true, however, that Paul 
impHes that the appearances of the risen Christ to the other 
apostles were exactly similar to Christ's appearance to him on the 
road to Damascus. His claim was simply that he, too, had seen 
Christ. The circumstances might be wholly diff"erent in his case. 
Jewish Christians who were hostile to Paul made a point of the 
difference between his knowledge of Christ through visions and the 
sort of knowledge vouchsafed to the other apostles. The risen 
Christ whom these saw did not speak to them from heaven. They 
believed him to be with them on the earth. He had not yet 
ascended. His real or supposed presence in the body with them 
was an essential part of what they related. Without it, the whole 
idea of the ascension was meaningless. We might go farther, and 
say, that, in the absence of decisive proof to the contrary, it is to 
be presumed that the accounts which the apostles were in the 
habit of giving of their interviews with the risen Jesus — facts so 
immeasurably important to themselves and others — are, in the 
main, preserved in the Gospels. Why should it be doubted that at 
least the essential nature of these interviews, or of their impression 
of them, about which the Apostle Paul had so particularly inquired, 
can be learned from the Evangelists? 

But the details in the Gospel narratives may be left out of 
account for the present.^ The main facts indisputably embraced 

1 Inconsistencies, real or only apparent, in respect to the details, in the 
Gospel narratives, are such as might be expected in accounts from different 
sources. They are such as are met with in secular history in connection with 
epoch-making events, the reahty of which is not subject to doubt. The 
hurried and scanty notices in Mark and Matthew are in accord with 
the habit of restriction to Galilean occurrences. The last twelve verses in 
Mark do not belong in the text. The text closes abruptly (ver. 8) with the 
statement that the women did not report to the disciples the message relating 
to Galilee. Not unlikely the second Gospel was the source of what is set 
down in the first (except Matthew xxviii. 9, 10). If Mark repeated what was 
ascertained from Peter, we should expect that he would not have omitted the 



196 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

in the testimony of the apostles are sufficient. There are criteria 
of hallucination. If there were not, we should on all occasions be 
at a loss to know when to credit witnesses, or even when to trust 
our own senses. We have to consider, in the first place, the state 
of mind into which the apostles were thrown by the crucifixion. 
It was a state of sorrow and dejection. Their hopes for the time 
were crushed. Whoever has seen the dead Christ in the famous 
painting of Rubens at Antwerp can imagine the feeling of the 
disciples when they looked on the terrible reality. How was it 
possible for them within a few days — within two days, in the case 
of some, if not of all — to recover from the shock? How was it 
possible that in so short a time joy took the place of grief and fear? 
Whence came the sudden rekindhng of faith, and with it the cour- 
age to go forth and testify, at the risk of their own lives, that Jesus 
was indeed the Messiah? The glowing faith, rising to an ecstasy 
of peace and assurance, out of which hallucination might spring, 
did not exist. The necessary materials of illusion were absolutely 
wanting. The natural suggestion of the language of Paul is that 
the manifestation to Peter was on the third day, and this is con- 
firmed by Luke (xxiv. 34) . There was no long interval of silent 
brooding over the Master's words and worth. There was no grad- 
ual recall of predictions or intimations of a continued presence 
or another coming that had mingled in his conversations with them. 
The time was short — a few days. Even then there are no traces 
of any fever of enthusiasm. The interviews with the risen Christ 
are set down in the Gospels in a brief, calm way, without any 
marks of bewildering agitation. No, the revulsion of feeling must 
have been produced from without. The event that produced it 
was no creation of the apostles' minds. It took them by surprise. 
Secondly, the number and variety of the persons — five hundred 
at once — who constitute the witnesses, heighten the difficulty in 
the way of the hallucination- theory. Under circumstances so 
gloomy and disheartening, how were so many persons — compris- 
ing, as they must have comprised, all varieties of temperament — 
transported by the same enthusiasm to such a pitch of be wilder- 
appearance of Christ to Peter, which is attested by Paul as well as by Luke. 
On these points, and on the proof of the occurrence of the manifestations of 
Christ, certainly the earliest and the most of them in Jerusalem, see the 
instructive monograph of Loofs, Die Auferstehungs-Berichte ti. ihr Wert 
(1898). 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 1 97 

ment as to confound a mental image of Christ with the veritable, 
present reality ? But, thirdly, a greater difficulty lies in the limited 
number of the alleged appearances of Jesus, considering the state of 
mind which must be assumed to have existed if the hallucination- 
theory is adopted. Instead of a small number, there would have 
been a multitude of such "visions." This the analogy of religious 
delusions authorizes us to assert. If the five hundred collectively 
imagined themselves to see Christ, a great portion of them would 
individually, before and after, have imagined the same thing. The 
limited, carefully marked, distinctly recollected number of the 
appearances of Jesus to the apostles is a powerful argument against 
the theory of illusion. Fourthly, connected with this last consid- 
eration is another most impressive fact. There was a limitation 
of time as well as of number. The appearances of Jesus, whatever 
they were, ceased in a short period. Why did they not continue 
longer? There were visions of one kind and another afterward. 
Disbelievers point to these as a proof of the apostles' credulity. 
Be this as it may, the question recurs. Why were there no more 
visions of the risen Jesus to be placed in the same category with 
those enumerated by Paul? Stephen's vision was of Christ in the 
heavenly world. In the persecutions recorded in Acts, when mar- 
tyrs were perishing, why were there no Christophanies? There is 
not a solitary case of an alleged actual appearance of Jesus on the 
earth to disciples, after the brief period which is covered by the 
instances recorded by Paul and the Evangelists. There were those 
distinct occurrences, standing by themselves, definitely marked, 
beginning at a certain time, ending at a certain time. 

We know what the mood of the apostles was from the time of 
these alleged interviews with the risen Christ. They set about 
the work of preaching the gospel of the resurrection, and of found- 
ing the Church. There was no more despondency, no more fal- 
tering. It is undeniable that they are characterized by sobriety 
of mind, and by a habit of reflection, without which, indeed, the 
whole movement would quickly have come to an end. The 
controversies attending the martyrdom of Stephen were not more 
than two years after the death of Jesus. Then followed the mis- 
sion to the Jews and to the heathen, the deliberations respecting 
the position to be accorded to the Gentile converts, and the whole 
work of organizing and training the churches. To be sure, they 
claimed to be guided by the Divine Spirit. Light was imparted 



198 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

to them, from time to time, through visions. Take what view one 
will of these phenomena, it is plain, that, on the whole, a discreet, 
reflective habit characterized the apostles. This is clear enough 
from the Acts, and from the Epistles, on any sane view respecting 
the credibility of these books which critics are disposed to take. 
Now this reasonableness and sobriety belonged to the apostles 
from the first, or it did not. If it did, it excludes the supposition 
of that abandonment to dreamy emotion and uninquiring revery 
which the hallucination-theory implies. If it did not, then it 
behooves the advocates of this hypothesis to tell what it was that 
suddenly effected such a change in them. What broke up, on a 
sudden, the mood of excitement and flightiness which engendered 
notions of a fictitious resurrection ? How was a band of religious 
dreamers, not gradually, but in a very short space of time, trans- 
formed into men of discretion and good sense ? Why did these 
devotees not go on with their delicious dreams, in which they 
believed Jesus to be visibly at their side. The sudden, final ter- 
mination, without any outward cause producing it, of an absorb- 
ing religious enthusiasm like that which is imputed to the apostles 
and to the five hundred disciples, is without a parallel in the 
history of religion. 

It is the force of these considerations which compelled so keen 
a critic as Keim to deny credence to the illusion-theory. " It 
must be acknowledged," he says, " that this theory, which has 
lately become popular, is only an hypothesis that explains some 
things, but does not explain the main thing, nay, deals with the 
historical facts from distorted and untenable points of view."^ 
" If the visions are not a human product, not self-produced ; if 
they are not the blossom and fruit of a bewildering over excite- 
ment ; if they are something strange, mysterious ; if they are 
accompanied at once with astonishingly clear perceptions and 
resolves, — then it remains to fall back on a source of them not 
yet named : it is God and the glorified Christ." ^ Thus the ces- 
sation of the visions at a definite point can be accounted for. 
The extraneous power that produced them ceased to do so. It 
was, in truth, the personal act and self-revelation of the departed 
Jesus. Without this supernatural manifestation of himself to 
convince his disciples that he still lived in a higher form of 
being, his cause would, in all probability, have come to an end at 
1 Gesch.Jesu von Nazara, vol. iii. p. 600. ^ Ibid., p. 602. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 1 99 

his death. Faith in him as Messiah would have gradually vanished, 
the disciples would have gone back to Judaism and the synagogue, 
and the words of Jesus would have been buried in the dust of 
oblivion.^ A powerful impression, not originating in themselves, 
but coming from without, from Christ himself, alone prevented 
this catastrophe. The admission of a miracle is extorted from 
this writer by the untenableness of every other solution that can be 
thought of. At the end of a work which is largely taken up with 
attempts, direct or indirect, to displace supernatural agency, 
Keim finds himself impelled by the sheer pressure of the evidence 
to assert its reality, and to maintain that the very survival of 
Christianity in the world after the death of Jesus depended on it. 
If he still stumbles at the particular form of the miracle which 
the testimony obhges us to accept, yet the miracle of a self- 
manifestation of Jesus to the apostles he is constrained to presup- 
pose. 

On a question of this kind historical evidence can go no farther. 
When it is declared by a large number of witnesses who have no 
motive to deceive, that a certain event took place before their 
eyes, and when the circumstances forbid the hypothesis of self- 
deception, there would appear to be no alternative but to admit 
the reality of the fact. The proof is complete. The fact may 
still be denied by an unreflecting incredulity. It may be affirmed 
to be impossible, or to be under any circumstances incapable of 
proof. Against such a contention, testimony, historical proof of 
any sort is powerless. The immovable faith of the apostles that 
Jesus " showed himself alive to them " is a fact that nobody ques- 
tions. Without that faith Christianity would have died at its birth. 
Whoever refuses to give credit to their testimony ought to explain 
in some satisfactory way the origin, strength, and persistence of that 
faith. 

X. The concessions which are extorted by the force of the evi- 
dence from the ablest disbelievers in the miracles are fatal to their 
own cause. 

At the beginning of this century the theory of Paulus, the Ger- 
man Euemerus, was brought forward. It was the naturalistic 
solution. The stories of miracles in the New Testament were 
based on facts which were misunderstood. These were actual 
occurrences ; but they were looked at through a mist of supersti- 
1 Gesch.Jesu von Nazara^ vol. iii. p. 605. 



200 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

tious belief, and thus misinterpreted and magnified. Jesus had 
a secret knowledge of potent remedies, and the cures which he 
eifected by the appHcation of them passed for miracles. The 
instances of raising the dead were cases of only apparent death. 
For example, Jesus saw that the son of the widow of Nain was 
not really dead. Perhaps the young man opened his eyes, or 
stirred, and thus discovered to Jesus that he was alive. Jesus 
mercifully saved him from a premature burial. He did not think 
himself called upon to correct the mistaken judgments of the dis- 
ciples and of others, who attributed his beneficent acts to preter- 
natural power. He allowed himself in a tacit accommodation 
to the vulgar ideas in these matters. This theory was seriously 
advocated in learned tomes. It was applied in detail in elaborate 
commentaries on the Gospels. 

Strauss simply echoed the general verdict to which all sensible 
and right-minded people had arrived, when he scouted this at- 
tempted explanation of the Gospel narratives, and derided the 
exegesis by which it was supported. The theory of Paulus made 
the apostles fools, and Christ a Jesuit. But the hypothesis which 
Strauss himself brought forward, if less ridiculous, was not a whit 
more tenable. Unconscious myths generated by communities of 
disciples who mistook their common fancies for facts ; myths 
generated by bodies of disciples cut off from the care and over- 
sight of the apostles who knew better ; by disciples, who, neverthe- 
less, succeeded in substituting in all the churches their fictitious 
narrative, in the room of the true narrative, which was given by 
the apostles, — here were improbabilities so gross as to prevent 
the mythical theory from gaining a lasting foothold in the field 
of historical criticism. It was impossible, as it was explained 
above, to see how the faith of the myth-making division of disci- 
ples was produced at the start. No such class of disciples, cut 
off from the superintendence of the apostles, existed. If it be 
supposed that such a class of disciples did exist, the agents who 
planted Christianity in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire 
were not from these, but were the apostles and their followers. 
And then, how could the established tradition as to Christ's fife be 
superseded by another narrative, emanating from some obscure 
source, and presenting a totally diverse conception from that 
which the apostles or their pupils were teaching? So the mythi- 
cal theory went the way of the naturalistic scheme of Paulus. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 201 

Seeing his failure, Strauss afterward tried to change the definition 
of myth, and to introduce an element of conscious invention into 
the idea ; but in so doing he destroyed the work of his own hands. 
Or rather he sought shelter in a house which he, in common with 
many others, had shown to be built on the sand. 

Renan has undertaken, in a series of volumes, to furnish upon 
the naturalistic basis an elaborate explanation of the origin of 
Christianity. In the successive editions of his Life of Jesus he has 
considered and reconsidered the problem of the miracles. What 
has he to say ? He tells us that miracles at that epoch were thought 
indispensable to the prophetic vocation. The legends of Elijah 
and Elisha were full of them. It was taken for granted that the 
Messiah would perform many.^ Jesus believed that he had a gift 
of healing. He acquired repute as an exorcist.- Nay, it is unde- 
niable that " acts which would now be considered fruits of illusion 
or hallucination had a great place in the life of Jesus." ^ The four 
Gospels, he holds, render this evident. Renan sees that there 
is no way of escaping the conclusion that miracles seemed to be 
wrought, and that they were a very marked feature in the history 
as it actually occurred. Those about Jesus — the entourage — 
were probably more struck with the miracles than with anything 
CISC'* How shall this be accounted for? Illusion in the mind 
of Jesus, an exaggerated idea of his powers, will go a little way 
toward a solution of the question, but does not suffice. It must 
be held that the part of a thaumaturgist was forqed on Jesus by 
the craving of disciples and the demand of current opinion. He 
had either to renounce his mission or to comply.^ His miracles 
were *' a violence done him by his age, a concession which a press- 
ing necessity wrested from him." ^ There were miracles, or trans- 
actions taken for miracles, in which he consented " to play a 
part." ^ He was reluctant ; it was distasteful to him ; but he 
consented. Then come M. Renan's apologies for Jesus. Sin- 
cerity is not a trait of Orientals. We must not be hard upon 
deception of this sort. We must conquer our "repugnances." 
" We shall have a right to be severe upon such men when we have 
accomplished as much with our scruples as they with their lies." 

1 Vie de Jesus, p. 266, cf. p. 271. * Ibid., p. 269. 

2 Ibid., p. 273. ^ Ibid., p. 267. 
• Ibid,^ p. 277. ® Ibid., p. 279. 

T72i</., p. 513. 



202 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

In that impure city of Jerusalem, Jesus was no longer himself. 
His conscience, by the fault of others, had lost its original clear- 
ness. He was desperate, pushed to the extremity, no longer 
master of himself. Death must come to restore him to liberty, 
to dehver him from a part which became every hour more exact- 
ing, more difficult to sustain.^ 

In plain English, Jesus was an impostor, reluctantly, yet really 
and consciously. From enthusiasm it went on to knavery ; for 
pious fraud, notwithstanding M. Renan's smooth deprecation, is 
fraud. The Son of man sinks out of sight, with his conscience 
clouded, his character fallen. M. Renan's excuses for him are 
not mere excuses for a wicked person, or one thought to be such, 
but for wickedness itself. Even his apologies for Judas are less 
offensive. 

This defamation of Jesus is for the theory of disbeHef a reductio 
ad absurdum. The wise and good of all Christian ages are told 
that their veneration is misplaced. Jesus was not the " holy one." 
There is nothing even heroic in him. He is swept away by a 
popular current, giving up his rectitude, giving up his moral dis- 
crimination. He is made up in equal parts of the visionary and 
the deceiver. By his moral weakness he brings himself into such 
an entanglement, that to escape from it by death is a piece of 
good fortune. He to whom mankind have looked up as to the 
ideal of holiness turns out to be, first a dreamer, then a fanatic 
and a charlatan. It is proved that a clean thing can come out of 
an unclean. Out of so muddy a fountain there has flowed so 
pure a stream. Courage, undeviating truth, steadfast loyalty to 
right against all seductions, in all these Christian ages, have sprung 
from communion with a dishonest man, who obeyed the maxim 
that the end justifies the means. For no gloss of rhetoric can 
cover up the meaning that lies underneath M. Renan's fine 
phrases. When the hght coating of French varnish is rubbed off, 
it is a picture of degrading dupHcity that is left. 

This is the last word of scientific infidelity. Let the reader 
mark the point to which his attention is called. On any rational 
theory about the date and authorship of the Gospels, it is found 
impossible to doubt that facts supposed at the time of their occur- 
rence to be miraculous were plentiful in the life of Jesus. The 
advocates of Atheism are driven to the hypothesis of hallucination 

1 Vie de Jestis, p. 375. 



PRELIMINARY PROOF OF THE MIRACLES 203 

with a large infusion of pious fraud. There is no fear that such 
a theory will prevail. No being could exist with the heterogene- 
ous, discordant qualities attributed by Renan to Christ. Were 
such a being possible, the new Hfe of humanity could never have 
flowed from so defiled a source. 

The arguments which this chapter contains will not convince 
an atheist. One who denies that God is a personal being is, in 
direct proportion to the force of his conviction, debarred from 
believing in a miracle. There can be no supernatural element 
introduced into the course of events if nothing supernatural 
exists. One will either seek for some other explanation of the 
phenomena, or leave the problem unsolved. Secondly, these 
arguments, it is believed, separately taken, are vahd ; but they 
are also to be considered together. Their collective strength is 
to be estimated. If the single rod could be broken, the same 
may not be true of the bundle. Thirdly, it is not to be forgotten 
that demonstrative reasoning on questions of historical fact is 
precluded. He who requires a coercive argument where prob- 
able reasoning alone is applicable must be left in doubt or dis- 
belief. In the strongest conceivable case of probable reasoning 
there is always a possibility of the opposite opinion being true. 
Enough that reasonable doubt is excluded.^ 

1 On Heathen and Ecclesiastical Miracles, see Appendix, Note 21. 



CHAPTER X 

THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD OF THE TESTIMONY GIVEN BY 

THE APOSTLES 

What did the apostles testify? Is their testimony concerning 
Jesus to be relied on? In the historical inquiry which we are pur- 
suing, these are the questions to be answered. The subject of 
the authorship and date of the Gospels is important from its rela- 
tion to the first of these points. Only by investigating the origin 
of the Gospels can we ascertain whether these writings are a trust- 
worthy account of the testimony given by the apostles. But 
proof, from whatever quarter it may come, that such is the fact, 
even though not touching directly the question by what particular 
authors the Gospels were written, it is pertinent to adduce. And 
proof of this character, it will be seen, is not wholly wanting. 

There is one remark to be made at the threshold of the dis- 
cussion before us. The circumstance that the Gospels contain 
accounts of miracles gives rise, in some minds, to a conscious or 
unconscious disinclination to refer these writings to the apostles, or 
to regard them as a fair and true representation of their testimony. 
But this bias is unreasonable. Apart fi"om the general considera- 
tion, that the very idea of revelation implies miracle, it has been 
already proved that accounts of miracles, and of some at least 
of the very miracles recorded in these histories, did form a part 
of the narratives of the ministry of Jesus which the apostles were 
accustomed to give. 

The proof of the genuineness of the Gospels is like that which 
determines the authorship of other ancient writings — for example, 
the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, who was a contem- 
porary of the apostles, Plutarch's Lives, or the histories of Livy and 
Tacitus. In the case of the Gospels we have additional sources 
of proof in the relation of the Gospels to the Christian societies, 
the unique interest felt in these narratives, and the wide-spread 
use made of them. The idea that they were not ascribed to their 

204 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 205 

real authors is unreasonable, unless definite objections can be 
alleged of sufficient weight to counteract the customary force of 
evidence from the tradition. Doubts resting on no solid basis, or 
guesses, are as little to be regarded as if they had reference to the 
authorship of the orations of Cicero. 

The universal reception of the four Gospels as having exclusive 
authority by the churches in the closing part of the second cen- 
tury, requires to be accounted for, if their genuineness is called in 
question. The Christian literature which has survived from the 
latter part of the first century and the beginning of the second 
is scanty and fragmentary. But when we come out into the light 
in the last quarter of the second century, we find the Gospels of 
the canon in undisputed possession of the field. We hear, more- 
over, from all quarters, the declaration that these are the Gospels 
which have come down from the apostles. We are given to 
understand that their genuineness had never been questioned 
in the churches. There was no centralized organization, be it re- 
membered, such as might be misled by designing men to lend 
authority to their claims. They owed this universal acceptance 
to the concerted action of no priesthood, to the decree of no 
council. The simple fact is, that these books — ascribed respec- 
tively to four authors, two of whom were apostles, and the other 
two were not — were recognized by the Christian churches every- 
where, and, it was alleged, had been thus recognized without dis- 
pute. Here is Irenaeus, born at least as early as a.d. 130 — 
probably a number of years earlier ^ — in Asia Minor, bishop of 
the church of Lyons from a.d. 178 to 202 ; an upright man in a 
conspicuous position, and with ample means of acquiring a knowl- 
edge of the churches in Asia Minor and Italy, as well as in Gaul. 
In defending Christian truth against the grotesque speculations of 
the Gnostics, he is led, at the beginning of the third book of his 
treatise, to make his appeal to the Scriptures. This leads him to 
present an account of the composition of the Gospels, — how 

1 Lightfoot (^Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 264) would fix the date of 
Irengeus's birth at a.d. 120 ; Ropes {Bib. Sacra, April, 1877, pp. 288 seq.'), 
at about A.D. 126 ; so Hilgenfeld. But Zahn argues ably (Herzog u. Plitt's 
Real. Encycl.,yn\. X"^^ seq.') for an earlier date, a.d. 115. Harnack formerly 
in accord {Die Uberlieferung d. griechischen Apologg. d. 2ien Jahrh., p. 204) 
now would assign A.D. 130 as the earliest admissible date, but favors a date 
"shortly before a.d. 142" {Chronologie, i. 329). 



206 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Matthew published "a written Gospel among the Hebrews in 
their own language " ; Mark put in writing " the things that were 
preached by Peter " ; Luke, " the attendant of Paul," wrote the 
third Gospel; and "afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, 
who also leaned on his breast — he again put forth his Gospel 
while he abode at Ephesus in Asia."^ He is not, be it observed, 
announcing any new discoveries. He is simply explaining what 
was commonly understood. These Gospels, and no others, he 
tells us, the churches acknowledge. Fully to illustrate how Ire- 
nseus constantly assumes the exclusive authority of the Gospels of 
the canon would require us to transfer to these pages no incon- 
siderable part of his copious work. Passing over the sea to 
Alexandria, we find Clement, who was born probably at Athens, 
certainly not later than a.d. i6o, and was at the head of the 
catechetical school in the city of his adoption from a.d. 190 to 
203, having previously travelled in Greece, Italy, Syria, and Pales- 
tine.^ Referring to a statement in an apocryphal Gospel, he 
remarks that it is not found "in the four Gospels which have 
been handed down to us." ^ In another place he states the order 
in which these Gospels were written as he had learned it from 
" the oldest presbyters." * Then, from the church of North Africa 
we have the emphatic affirmations of Tertullian (born about a.d. 
160) of the sole authority of the four Gospels, which were written 
by apostles and by apostolic men, their companions.^ In the 
churches founded by the apostles, and by the churches in fellow- 
ship with them, he asserts, the Gospel of Luke had been received 
since its first publication. "The same authority of the apostolic 
churches," he adds, " will also support the other Gospels," of 
which Matthew, Mark, and John were the authors. The Mura- 
torian Fragment of Roman origin, the date of which is not far 
from A.D. 170, is a fragment which begins in the middle of a sen- 
tence. That sentence, from its resemblance to a statement made 
by an earlier writer, Papias, respecting Mark, as well as from what 
immediately follows in the document itself, evidently relates to 
this Evangelist. This broken sentence is succeeded by an account 
of the composition of Luke, which is designated as the third Gos- 
pel, and then of John. In Syria, the Peshito, the Bible of the 
ancient Syrian churches, having its origin at about the same time 

1 Adv. Hccr., ii. i. 2 Euseb., H. E.,v.ii. ^ Strom., iii. 553 (ed. Potter). 

* rOiv a.viK(iQtv irpea^vT^pcjv, Euseb., JI. £., vi. 14. ^ Adv. Marc, iv. 2-6. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 20/ 

as the Muratorian Fragment, begins with the four Gospels. The 
canon of Scripture was then in process of formation ; and the 
absence from the Peshito of the second and third Epistles of John, 
second Peter, Jude, and Revelation, — books which were disputed 
in the ancient church, — is a proof at once of the antiquity of that 
version and of the value of the testimony given by it to the uni- 
versal reception of the Gospels. 

It must be borne in mind that the Fathers who have been 
named above are here referred to, not for the value of their opin- 
ion as individuals in regard to the authorship of the Gospels, but 
as witnesses for the footing which they had in the churches. These 
Christian societies now encircled the Mediterranean. They were 
scattered over the Roman Empire from Syria to Spain.^ No 
doubt the exultation of the Fathers of the second century over the 
rapid spread and the prospects of Christianity led to hyperbole in 
describing the progress it had made.^ But, making all due allow- 
ance for rhetorical fervor, it is to be remembered that, in writing 
for contemporaries, it would have been folly for them intentionally 
to indulge in misstatement in a matter of statistics with which 
their readers were as well acquainted as they were themselves. 
Christians had become numerous enough to excite anxiety more 
and more in the rulers of the empire. The question to be an- 
swered is, how this numerous, widely dispersed body had been 
led unanimously to pitch upon these four narratives as the sole 
authorities for the history of Jesus. For what reasons had they 
adopted, nullo contradicente^ these four Gospels exclusively, one 
of which was ascribed to Matthew, a comparatively obscure apos- 
tle, and two others to Luke and Mark, neither of whom belonged 
among the Twelve ? 

But the situation of these Fathers personally, as it helps us to 
determine the value of their judgment on the main question, is 

1 There were Christians in Spain (Irenaeus, Adv. Hcer., i. lo, 2; TertuUian, 
Adv. Judceos^ c. 7). If, as is probable, Spain is designated by the rb r^pfxa 
TTJs dva-eus of Clement of Rome (>?/., v.), St. Paul visited that country. See 
Bishop Lightfoot's note (T/ie Epp. of Clement of Rome ^ p. 49). 

2 TertuUian {Adv. Judceos, c, 7; Apol.^ c. 37), Irenaeus (^Adv. Hcer., i. 10, 
I, 2; iii. 4, i), cf. Justin {Dial., c. 117). For Gibbon's comments on these 
statements, see Decline and Fall, etc., ch. xv. (Smith's ed., ii. 213, n. 177). 
Gibbon refers to Origen's remark {Contra Cels., viii. 69), that the Christians 
are "very few" cot?iparatively ; but he omits another passage (c. ix.) of the 
same work, in which Origen refers to them as a " multitude," of all ranks. 



208 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

worth considering. Irenseus has occasion, in connection with the 
passage already cited from him, to dwell on the tradition respect- 
ing the teaching of the apostles which is preserved in the various 
churches founded by them. Of these churches he says, that it is 
easy to give the lists of their bishops back to their foundation. 
By way of example, he states the succession of the Roman bishops. 
In these lists, as given by the ancient writers, there will be some 
discrepancies as to the earliest names, owing chiefly to the fact 
that, in the time before episcopacy was fully developed, leading 
presbyters, and not always the same persons, would be set down 
in the catalogues.^ But a person who is familiar now with any 
particular church in whose history he has felt a strong interest will 
have little difficulty in recounting the succession of its pastors ex- 
tending back for a century, and will not be ignorant of any very 
remarkable events which have occurred in its affairs during that 
period. Moreover, Irenseus was acquainted with individuals who 
had been taught by John and by other apostles. He had known 
in early life Polycarp, whose recollections of the Apostle John 
were fresh.^ He had conferred with " elders " — that is, venerated 
leaders in the Church, of an earlier day — who had been pupils of 
men whom the apostles had instructed. His language indicates 
that some of them had sat at the feet of the apostles themselves.^ 
Of one of these '^ elders " in particular he makes repeated men- 
tion, whose name is not given, but whom in one place he styles 
" apostolorum discipulus." * The phrase hardly admits of more 
than one interpretation. Pothinus, whom Irenseus succeeded at 
Lyons, was thrown into prison in the persecution under Marcus 
Aurelius, a.d. 177, and died two days after, being past ninety 

1 Gieseler's Church History, I. i. 3, § 34, n. 10. 

2 Adv. Hcer., iii. 3, 4; Epist. ad Flor. 

3 Adv. Har., ii. 22, 5; iii. i, i; iii. 3, 4; v. 32, i; v. 33, 3; v. 33, 4; cf. 
Euseb., H. E., iii. 23, iv. 14, v. 8. In iv. 27, i, Irenseus speaks of what he had 
heard from a certain presbyter " who had heard from those who had seen the 
Apostles, et ab his qui didicerant." The last clause may denote " those who 
were disciples of Christ himself," or the " ab his " may belong after " qui," and 
the meaning may be " those who had been taught " by such as had seen the 
apostles. See the comment of Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, 
p. 266. See also the elaborate discussion, embracing a review of Harnack's 
interpretations, in Zahn's Forschungen zur Gesch. d. N. T. Kanons u. d. alt- 
kirchl. Lit., Theil vi., p. 53 seq. 

* Adv. Har., iv. 32, i. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 209 

years old. Pothinus was probably from Asia Minor, whence the 
church at Lyons was planted. His memory ran back beyond the 
beginning of the century. He is one of many who had numbered 
among their acquaintances younger contemporaries of apostles. 
Clement of Alexandria was a pupil of Pantaenus, who had founded 
the catechetical school there shortly after the middle of the second 
century. As a Christian learner, he had been taught by promi- 
nent teachers in different countries in the East and in the West. 
In all of the oldest churches there were persons who were sepa- 
rated from apostles by only one link. 

The attempt has often been made to discredit the testimony of 
Irenaeus by reference to a passage which really strengthens it. 
After asserting that there are four Gospels and no more, he fan- 
cifully refers to the analogy of the four winds, four divisions of the 
earth, four faces of the cherubim, four covenants, etc.^ We are 
told by Froude, " That there were four true evangelists, and that 
there could be neither more nor less than four, Irenaeus had per- 
suaded himself, because there were four winds or spirits," etc.^ It 
is plain to every reader of Irenaeus, that his belief in the four 
Gospels is founded on the witness given by the churches and by 
well-informed individuals, to their authenticity, and that these 
analogies merely indicate how entirely unquestioned was the 
authority of the Gospels in his own mind and in the minds of all 
Christian people. It was something as well settled as the cos- 
mical system. If some enthusiast for the Hanoverian house were 
to throw out the suggestion that there must be four, and only four, 
Georges, because there are four quarters of the globe, four winds, 
etc., Froude would hardly announce that the man's conviction of 
the historic fact that those four kings have ruled in England is 
founded on these fanciful parallels. Froude himself shrinks from 
his own assertion as quoted above ; for he adds, " It is not to be 
supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the 
world to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as 
these ; they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds 
for the decision," etc. But then he continues, "The mere em- 
ployment of such figures as evidence in any sense shows the 
enormous difference between their modes of reasoning and ours, 
and illustrates the difficulty of deciding, at our present distance 
from them, how far their conclusions were satisfactory." If they 

^ Adv. Hcer., iii. 2, 7. ^ Short Studies on Great Subjects, p. 213. 

P 



2IO THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

had " other closer and more accurate " grounds of belief, why 
should such instances of weakness in reasoning, even were it in- 
tended as strict reasoning, operate to destroy the value of their 
testimony? A man v/ho is not a faultless logician may be a 
perfectly credible witness to facts within his cognizance. But the 
inference suggested by Froude's remark as to the intellectual 
character of Irenaeus is hasty. A single instance of weak rea- 
soning is a slender basis for so broad a conclusion. Jonathan 
Edwards is rightly considered a man of penetrating intellect and 
of unsurpassed skill in logic. Yet in his diary he makes this 
absurd remark : "January, 1728. I think Christ has recommended 
rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave so early." ^ 
Certainly no one would feel himself justified, on account of 
Edwards's remark, in disputing his word on a matter of fact within 
his personal cognizance. We do not mean that Irengeus had the 
same measure of intellectual vigor as Edwards ; nevertheless, he 
is not to be stigmatized as a weak man, and he furnishes in his 
writings a great many examples of sound reasoning. The inference 
unfavorable to the value of his testimony, which Froude in com- 
mon with many others has drawn from a single instance of fanciful 
argument or illustration, is itself an example of flimsy logic. 

In quoting the statements of the Christian writers of the closing 
part of the second century, it is not implied, of course, that either 
they or their informants were incapable of error. Who does not 
know that traditions, the substance of which is perfectly trust- 
worthy, may interweave incidental or minor details, which, if not 
without foundation, at least require to be sifted? A tradition may 
tat;e up new features of this character, even in passing from one 
individual to another, when there is an average degree of accuracy 
in both. But every intelligent historical critic knows the distinc- 
tion which is to be made between essential facts and their acces- 
sories. It is only the ignorant, or the sophist who has an end to 
accomplish, that ignore this distinction, and seek to apply the 
maxim, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which relates to wilful 
mendacity, to the undesigned modifications which oral statements 
are almost sure to experience in the process of transmission from 
one to another. It is evident that the few documents on which 
the Christians of the second century depended for their knowledge 
of the life and ministry of Christ must have had an importance 
1 Dwight's Life of Edwards, p. 106. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 211 

in their eyes which would render the main facts as to the origin 
of these writings of extreme interest and importance. As to these 
documents, the foundation of the faith for which they were ex- 
posing themselves to torture and death, information would be 
earnestly sought and highly prized. That this curiosity, which 
we should expect to find, really existed, the ecclesiastical writers 
plainly indicate. 

Let us now step back from the age of Irenaeus to the first half 
of the second century. In that obscure period, where so many 
writings which might have thrown light on the questions before 
us have perished, there is one author who is competent to afford 
us welcome information. It is Justin Martyr. He was born in 
Palestine, at Flavia Neapohs, near the site of the ancient Sichem. 
He was in Ephesus about a.d. 135. He had been an adherent of 
the Platonic School, and at this date wore the garb of a philosopher, 
a fact which shows that he was not a youth. From his pen there 
remain two apologies, the second being the sequel or appendix of 
the first, which was addressed to Antoninus Pius, not later than 
A.D. 152, and a dialogue with Trypho, a Jew. In these writings, 
two of which are directed to heathen, and the third designed to 
influence Jews, there was no occasion to refer to the Evangelists 
by name. The sources from which he draws his accounts of the 
life and teaching of Jesus are styled Memohs, a term borrowed 
from the title given by Xenophon to his reminiscences of Socrates. 
Were these Memoirs the four Gospels of the canon ? ^ 

The first observation to be made is, that a tolerably full narra- 
tive of the life of Jesus can be put together from Justin's quota- 
tions and allusions, and that this narrative coincides with the 
canonical Gospels. The quotations are not verbally accurate ; 
neither are Justin's citations from heathen writers or the Old 
Testament prophets. He is not always in verbal agreement with 

^ On the subject of the Memoirs of Justin and his quotations, the following 
writers are of special value : Semisch, Die apostolischen Denkwui'digkeiten 
des Mdrtyrers Justimcs (1848); Sanday, The Gospels in the Second Centujy, 
pp. 88-138; Norton, The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, \o\.'\. 
pp. 200-240, ccxiv.-ccxxxiii.; Westcott, History of the Canon of the N. T. 
(iSSi), pp. 96-179; Professor E. Abbot, "The Authorship of the Fourth 
Gospel," Critical Essays (I); Purves, The Testimony of Justin Martyr, etc. 
(1S89); also Bleek's Einl. in d. N. T. (ed. Mangold), p. 271 seq. ; Hilj^en- 
feld's Kritisch. Untersiich. tiber die Evangell. Justijis, der Clementiner, u, 
Marcions. 



212 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

himself when he has occasion to cite a passage or to refer to an 
incident more than once.^ It was not a custom of the early 
Fathers to quote the New Testament writers with verbal accuracy. 
Justin blends together statements in the diiferent Gospels. This 
is easily accounted for on the supposition that he was quoting from 
memory, and when it is remembered that, for the purpose which 
he had in view, he had no motive to set off carefully to each 
EvangeUst what specially belonged to him. A similar habit of con- 
necting circumstances from the several Gospels is not unfrequent 
at present, familiar as these writings have now become. It is im- 
possible here to combine all the items of the gospel history which 
may be gathered up from Justin's writings, but an idea of their 
character and extent may be given by casting a portion of them 
into a consecutive narrative.^ 

The Messiah, according to Justin, was born of a virgin. Particulars 
of the annunciation (Luke i. 26, 31, 35) and of Joseph's dream (Matt. 
i. 18-25) ^^^ given. He was born in Bethlehem, where his parents 
were, in consequence of the census under Quirinius. He was laid in a 
manger, was worshipped by the Magi, was carried by his parents into 
Egypt on account of the machinations of Herod, which led to the 
massacre of the children in Bethlehem. From Egypt they returned, 
after the death of Herod. At Nazareth Jesus grew up to the age of 
thirty, and was a carpenter (Mark vi. 3). There he remained until 
John appeared in his wild garb, declaring that he was not the Christ 
(John i. 19 seq.^^ but that One stronger than he was coming, whose 
shoes he was not worthy to bear. John was put in prison, and was be- 
headed, at a feast on Herod's birthday, at the instance of his sister's 
daughter (Matt. xiv. 6 seq.^. This John was the Elijah who was to 
come (Matt. xvii. 11-13). Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan. 
The temptation followed. To Satan's demand to be worshipped, 
Jesus replied, " Get thee behind me, Satan," etc. Jesus wrought mira- 
cles, healing the blind, dumb, lame, all weakness and disease, and 
raising the dead. He began his teaching by proclaiming that the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matt. iv. 17). Justin introduces a large 
number of the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, sayings from the 
narrative of the centurion of Capernaum (Matt. viii. 11,12; Luke xiii. 

1 E.g. Matt. xi. 27. See Apol.^ i. 63 ; Dial., 106. 

"^ The quotations from Justin are collected in Credner's Beitr'dge zur Einl.^ 
etc., pp. 150-209. The resume above is mainly abridged from Dr. Sanday's 
The Gospels in the Second Century^ pp. 91-98. Summaries of a like nature 
are given in Mr. Sadler's The Lost Gospel and its Contents (London, 1876); 
also by Purves, The Testimony of Justin Ma^-tyr, p. 1 79 seq. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 213 

28, 29), and of the feast in the house of Matthew. He brings in the 
choosing of the twelve disciples, the name Boanerges given to the sons 
of Zebedee (Mark iii. 17), the commission of the apostles, the discourse 
of Jesus after the departure of the messengers of John, the sign of the 
prophet Jonah, Peter's confession of faith (Matt. xvi. 15-18), the an- 
nouncement of the passion (Matt. xvi. 21). Justin has the story of the 
rich young man; the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem; the cleansing of 
the temple ; the wedding-garment ; the conversations upon the tribute- 
money, upon the resurrection (Luke xx. 35, 36), and upon the greatest 
commandment ; the denunciations of the Pharisees ; the eschatological 
discourse; and the parable of the talents (Matt. xxv. 14-30). Justin's 
account of the institution of the Lord's Supper corresponds to that of 
Luke. Jesus is said to have sung a hymn at the close of the Supper, to 
have retired with three of his disciples to the Mount of Olives, to have 
been in an agony, his sweat falling in drops to the ground (Luke xxii. 
42-44). His followers forsook him. He was brought before the 
scribes and Pharisees, and before Pilate. He kept silence before Pilate. 
Pilate sent him bound to Herod (Luke xxiii. 7). Most of the circum- 
stances of the crucifixion are narrated by Justin, such as the piercing 
with nails, the casting of lots, the fact of sneers uttered by the crowd, 
the cry, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " and the last 
words, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke xxiii. 46). 
Christ is said to have been buried in the evening, the disciples being 
all scattered, according to Zech. xiii. 7 (Matt. xxvi. 31, 56). On the 
third day he rose from the dead. He convinced his disciples that his 
sufferings had been predicted (Luke xxiv. 26, 46). He gave them his 
last commission. They saw him ascend into heaven (Luke xxiv. 50). 
The Jews spread a story that the disciples stole the body of Jesus from 
the grave (Matt, xxviii. 3). 

This is a mere outline of the references to the gospel history 
which are scattered in profusion through Justin's writings. A full 
citation of them would exhibit more impressively their correspond- 
ence to the Gospels. Harnack does not doubt that the Gospel 
and the First Epistle of John were known and cherished by Papias 
and the Presbyters, his informants, and that both works were 
extant before the end of Trajan's reign. There is no longer need, 
so far as their date is concerned, to discuss their relation either to 
Justin, or to Valentinus, or to Marcion.^ The larger portion of 
the matter, it will be perceived, accords with what we find in 
Matthew and Luke ; a small portion of it, however, is found in 
Mark exclusively. The Synoptics had been longer in use, and 

1 Harnack, Die Chronologie d. altchrisil. Lit.^ I. pp. 658, 659. 



214 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

citations from them, especially of sayings of Christ, were more 
current. Besides, Justin's aim was an apologetic one. He was 
not writing for Christian believers. Passages from the Synoptics 
he might naturally find better suited to the special ends he had in 
view. But there are not wanting clear and striking correspond- 
ences to John. The most important of these single passages is 
that relating to regeneration/ which, notwithstanding certain 
verbal variations to be noticed hereafter, bears a close resem- 
blance to John iii. 3-5. Again : Christ is said by Justin to have 
reproached the Jews as knowing neither the Father nor the Son 
(John viii. 19, xvi. 3). He is said to have healed those who were 
blind from "theii* birth," ^ using here a phrase which, like the 
fact, is found in John alone among the Evangehsts (John ix. i). 
Strongly as these and some other passages resemble incidents and 
sayings in John, the correspondence of Justin's doctrinal state- 
ments respecting the divinity of Christ and the Logos to the 
teaching of the fourth Gospel is even more significant. These 
statements are so many, and the emphasis attached to the doctrine 
is such, that an acknowledged authority must be at the basis of 
them. Justin speaks of Christ as the Son of God, "who alone is 
properly called Son, the Word ; who also was with him, and was 
begotten before" the works. ^ He says of Christ, that "he took 
flesh, and became man."^ We are "to recognize him as God 
coming forth from above, and Man living among men." ^ Concep- 
tions of this sort expressed in language either identical with that 
of John, or closely resembling it, enter into the warp and woof 
of Justin's doctrinal system. They are both in substance and style 
Johannean. It is not strange that he was acquainted with the 
Alexandrian Jewish philosophy, and that traces of its influence are 
not absent. But the incarnation was a conception foreign to that 
system. Professed theologians may think themselves able to point 
out shades of difference between Justin's idea of the preexistence 
and divinity of Christ and that of the fourth Gospel. But, if there 
be an appreciable difference, it is far less marked than differences 
which subsist among ancient and modern interpreters of the Gospel 
without number. The efforts of the author of the work entitled 
Supernatural Religion to make out a great diversity of idea from 

1 ApoL, i. 61. 8 Apol, ii. 6. Cf Dial, 129. 

2 Dial.y c. 49. 4 Ibid., i. 32. 

fi Ibid., i. 23. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 215 

unimportant variations of language — as in the statement that the 
Logos '' became man," instead of the Hebraic expression, " be- 
came flesh " — hardly merit attention. Some of his criticisms 
apply with equal force to the Nicene Creed, and would prove its 
authors to have been unacquainted with the fourth Gospel, or not 
to have believed in it.^ 

The next observation respecting Justin is, that his reference to 
events or sayings in the Gospel history which have not substantial 
parallels in the four evangelists are few and insignificant. ^ They 
embrace not more than two sayings of Jesus. The first is, " In what 
things I shall apprehend you, in these will I judge you,"^ which is 
found also in Clement of Alexandria ^ and Hippolytus.^ The second 
is, " There shall be schisms and heresies," ® — a prediction referred also 
to Christ by Tertullian "^ and Clement.^ Thus both passages occur in 
other writers who own no authoritative Gospels but the four of the 
canon. Justin represents the voice from heaven at the baptism of 
Jesus as saying, " Thou art my Son ; this day have I begotten thee," ^ 
— a combination of expressions, which is found in the Codex Bezae, in 

1 See The Lost Gospel, etc., p. 91. In Dial., c. 105, Justin is more natu- 
rally understood as referring a statement peculiar to the Memoirs to John. 
See Professor E. Abbot, "Authorship of the Fourth Gospel," in Critical 
Essays, p. 45. 

2 Scholars have searched in the early Christian literature for sayings attrib- 
uted to Christ which are not found in the four Gospels. The best known 
example of these agrapha, as they are termed, is the saying in Acts xx. 35, 
"It is more blessed to give than to receive." One of the best of the 
class of authors referred to is Resch, whose collection of materials has 
been critically examined by Professor J. H. Ropes. (^Die Spruche Jesu, etc., 
in Gebhardt u. Harnack's Texte u. Untersuchungen, etc., xiv. 2.) Professor 
Ropes reduces the number of such non-canonical sayings which, with any 
measure of probability, are really traceable to Jesus, to twenty-one. The Oxy- 
rhynchus Fragment, discovered not long ago in Egypt, contains seven logia, or 
sayings of this character. Other local or special collections of a like nature 
may, perhaps, yet be found. It must be said, however, that on the lists occur 
a not inconsiderable number, a comparison of which with the canonical say- 
ings of Christ awakens a decided doubt as to their authenticity. 

^ Dial., c. 47. * Quis div. salvus, c. 40. 

^ 0pp. ed. de Lag., p. 73 (0\.\.d's Justin, i. 2, p. 161, n. 21). The origin of 
the passage has been traced by some to Ezekiel, to whom Justin refers in 
the context. See Ezek, vii. 3, 8, xviii. 30, xxiv. 14, xxxiii. 20. Otto suggests 
that it may have been a marginal summary attached by some one to Matt, 
xxiv. 40 seq., xxv. I seq. 

^ Dial., c. 35, cf. c. 51 ; cf. i Cor. xi. 18, 19. "^ De Prcescript. Har., c. 4. 

^ Strom,, vii. 15, § 90. ^ Dial., c. 88, cf. c. 103. 



2l6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Clement of Alexandria,^ in Augustine,^ and is said by him to be the 
reading in some manuscripts, though not the oldest.^ The recurrence 
of the same expression in Ps. ii. 7, or Acts xiii. 33, Heb. i. 5, v. 5, led 
naturally to a confusion of memory, out of which this textual reading 
may have easily sprung. That Jesus was charged by the Jews with 
being a magician ^ is a statement made by Lactantius ^ as well as by 
Justin. There is evidence that it was probably derived by Justin from 
his Jewish contemporaries. The incidental saying, that the ass on 
which Jesus rode was tied to a vine,^ was probably a detail taken up 
from Gen. xlix. 11, with which it is connected by Justin. The say- 
ing connected with the designation of Jesus as a carpenter, that he 
made ploughs and yokes,' may have sprung from his words in Luke ix. 
62 and Matt. xi. 29, 30. It was found pleasant to imagine him to 
have once made these objects to which he figuratively referred.^ Jus- 
tin speaks of Jesus as having been born in a cave,^ but he also says that 
he was laid in a manger. That the stable which contained the manger 
was a cave or grotto was a current tradition in the time of Origen.^^ 
One other allusion is found in the brief catalogue of uncanonical passages 
in Justin. He speaks of a fire kindled on the Jordan in connection with 
the baptism of Jesus, — a circumstance which might have mingled itself 
early in the oral tradition. These constitute the supplement to the con- 
tents of the four Gospels to be found in the mass of Justin's references : ^^ 

1 Pad., i. 6. 2 Enchir, ad. Laur., c. 49. 

^ De Cons. Evv., ii. 14 (Otto, i. i, p. 325). 

* Dial., c. 49, cf. ApoL, i. 30. ^ See Otto, i. 2, p. 324; Semisch, p. 393. 

5 InstitutL, V. 3. 9 Dial., c. 78. 

^ Apol.,\. c. 32. ^"^ Coni. Celsum^ i. 51. 

7 Dial, c. 88. 

11 Other slight variations from the Gospels are sometimes owing to the wish 
of Justin to accommodate the facts in the life of Jesus to the predictions of 
the Old Testament. This is especially the case, as might be expected, in the 
dialogue with Trypho the Jew. The following, it is believed, are all the in- 
stances of circumstantial deviation from the Evangelists. Mary is said to have 
descended from David {Dial., c. 43, cf. cc. 45, 100, 120). This statement is 
connected (c. 68) with Isa. vii. 13. Irenseus and Tertullian say the same of 
Mary. The Magi came from Arabia {Dial., c. 77, cf. cc. 78, 88, 102, 106), on 
the basis of Ps. Ixxii. 10, 15 ; Isa. Ix. 6. The same is said by many later writers 
(Semisch, p. 385). In connection with Ps. xxii. ii, it is said {Dial., c. 103), 
that, when Jesus was seized, not a single person was there to help him. In 
Dial., c. 103, Pilate is said to have sent Jesus to Plerod bound ; this being 
suggested by Hos. vi. i. So Tertullian, Adv. Marc, iv. c. 42; also Cyril of 
Jerusalem (see Otto, i. 2, p. 370, n. 14). The Jews, it is said {ApoL, i. 35), 
set Jesus on the judgment-seat, and said, "Judge us," — which may be a 
confused recollection of John xix. 13, in connection with Matt, xxvii. 
26, 30. In Dial., i. loi (Apol. i. 38), the bystanders at the cross are 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 21/ 

and, as the author of Supernatural Religion^ the work referred to above, 
observes, " Justin's works teem with these quotations." In the index 
to Otto's critical edition they number 281. It may be here remarked, 
that not one of these supplementary scraps is referred by Justin to the 
Metnoirs. 

It is thus evident that, whatever the Memoirs were, their con- 
tents were substantially coincident with the contents of the four 
Gospels. It is a necessary inference that, at the time when Justin 
wrote, there existed a well-established tradition respecting the life 
and teaching of Jesus ; for the Memoirs, he tells us, were read on 
Sundays in the churches, in city and country.^ The period of his 
theological activity was from about a.d. 140 to a.d. 160. None 
will probably be disposed to question that as early, at least, as 
A.D. 135, which was some time after his conversion to Christianity, 
he was conversant with this gospel tradition, and knew that it was 
inculcated in the churches. The Jewish war of Barchochebas 
(a.d. 131 to 136), he says, was in his own time.^ But that date 
(a.d. 135), to which the personal recollection of Justin on this 
subject extended, was only thirty-seven years after the accession 
of Trajan, — an event which preceded the death of the Apostle 
John at Ephesus.^ If the date of Justin's acquaintance with the 
habitual teaching of the church respecting the life of Jesus were 
1902, in the room of 135, the termination of the apostle's life 
would be set no farther back from us than 1865. Justin incident- 
ally remarks, that many men and women sixty or seventy years 
old, who had been Christians from their youth, were to be found 

said to have distorted their lips, — the thing predicted in Ps. xxii. 7 ; and in 
Apol., i. 38, on the basis of several passages in the Psalms, they are said to 
have cried out, " He who raised the dead, let him save himself." In Apol., i. 
50, the disciples after the crucifixion are said to have fled from Christ, and 
denied him ; and in c. 106 (cf. c. 53) they are said to have repented of it 
after the resurrection ; the prophetic references being Zech. xiii. 7, and Isa. 
liii. 1-8. In Dial., c. 35, Jesus is represented as predicting that " false apos- 
tles " (as well as false prophets) will arise. This is not presented as an instance 
of prophecy fulfilled; but the same thing is found in TertuUian, De Prase. 
Hcerett., c. 4, and in other writers. In Dial., c. 51, Jesus predicts his reap- 
pearance at Jerusalem, and that he will eat and drink with his disciples, — 
a free paraphrase of Matt. xxvi. 29, and Luke xxii. 18. Not one of these pas- 
sages in the context where it occurs would naturally lead the reader to 
presuppose any other source of them than the canonical Gospels. 

^ApoL, i. 67. "^ Ibid., i. 31. *Irenaeus, Adv. Har., ii. 22, 5; ill. 3, 4. 



2l8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

in the churches.^ Many of his Christian contemporaries could 
remember as far back as the closing decades of the first century. 
Is it reasonable to beheve that in the interval between John and 
Justin, in the organized Christian societies of Syria, Asia Minor, 
and Italy, with which Justin is considered to have been conver- 
sant, the established conception of the Hfe of Jesus, of his doings 
and sayings, underwent an essential alteration ? 

Partly on the basis of the uncanonical passages in Justin, certain 
critics have contended that the mass of his quotations were derived 
from some other Gospel than the four ; in particular, from the Gospel 
of the Hebrews, or from an apocryphal Gospel of Peter. There was 
an Aramaic gospel, commonly called "the Gospel according to the 
Hebrews," which was extensively used by Jewish Christians in Palestine 
and Syria. It is referred to by a number of the Fathers. Jerome trans- 
lated it into Greek and Latin.^ It came to be thought that it was the 
original of the Gospel of Matthew of which Papias speaks. Possibly 
this was true of it in its primitive form ; for it underwent various 
modifications. In all its forms, however, it retained its affinity to our 
first Gospel. It is evident from the fragments that remain that the 
canonical Gospel is the original, and that the deviations from it in 
parallel texts in the Gospel of the Hebrews are of a later date. "The 
Aramaic fragments contain much that can be explained and understood 
only on the hypothesis that it is a recasting of the canonical text." ^ 
Respecting the Gospel of Peter, we have a statement, preserved in 
Eusebius, of Serapion, who was bishop of Antioch at the end of the 
second and beginning of the third century. He had found this book 
in use by some in the town of Rhossus in Cilicia. He had never heard 
of it before. It was tinged with the heresy of Docetism, although in 
the main orthodox. Eusebius * and Jerome ^ refer to it as an heretical 
book which no early teacher of the Church had made use of. A portion 
of this work, which was discovered in 1886-87, embraces a consecutive 
account of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus. It is later than the 
canonical Gospels, John included,^ and in a few instances varies from 
them. Justin in one passage '^ speaks of the change in Peter's name 
and the giving of the name Boanerges to James and John, his authority 

M/^/., i. 15. "^ De Vir. Ill, c. 2. 

8 For an elaborate and critical discussion of the Gospel of the Hebrews in its 
different forms, see Zahn, Einl. in d. N. T., II. 260 seq., and other passages, 
with the references to his Gesch. d. Kanons d. N. T. Also see Harnack, Die 
Chronologic d. altchristL Lit.f L p. 625 seq. 

* Euseb., H. E., iii. 25. ^ De Vir. III., I. 

6 Harnack now concurs in the opinion that this is probable. Ckronologie, 
I. 474. ^ ApoL, i. 35. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 219 

being "his [Peter's] Memoirs." This last incident is related only in 
the Gospel of Mark,^ whose Gospel was connected by the ancient writers 
with Peter as its indirect source. A similar passage occurs in the res- 
cued fragment of the Gospel of Peter. Harnack thinks it probable that 
Justin used this Gospel, and that he even included it in his Gospel 
Memoir sP- Schiirer rightly judges that the evidence does not suffice 
for either part of this conclusion. "In the scantiness of the data/' he 
remarks, " it is quite possible that Justin and the apocryphal Gospel, as to 
the passages in question, go back to a common source." ^ Dr. Sanday 
was disposed to think that Justin "used this new Gospel, but not 
largely." He adds that as a literary substratum, the canonical Gospels 
cover very nearly the whole ground which the apocryphal Gospel 
covers."* Dr. Chase (Hastings' Dictio7iary of the Bible, Art. "Peter 
Simon,") agrees with Schiirer. To the present writer the supposition 
of the use of it by Justin appears quite improbable, the supposition that 
he makes it one of his Me?noirs, eminently so. See Chase's article. 
For other reasons for this judgment, see p. 251 of the present work. 

Formerly certain critics were disposed to think that Justin drew 
the main portion of his quotations from the Jewish Christian 
Gospels. One reason for this contention was the character of the 
verbal deviations in these quotations from the text of the Gospels. 
This argument is destitute of force. 

His quotations are not more inexact than those of other Fathers 
which are known to be derived from the canonical Gospels. In one of 
the most striking instances of inexact quotation (Matt. x. 27 ; cf. Luke 
X. 22) the same variations from the canonical text are found in Clement 
of Alexandria, Origen, and Irenaeus.^ In repeated instances, Justin 
attributes passages to one prophet which belong to another.^ He 
quotes the Old Testament and heathen writers with the same sort of 
freedom. Where Justin varies from the Septuagint, he often varies in 
different places in the same manner. Hence uniformity of variation 
does not in the least warrant the inference of the use of other books 
than the Gospels. The main argument which is relied on to prove the 
non-canonical source of Justin's quotations is the alleged identity of 
some of them which deviate from the canonical text with quotations 
in the Clementine Homilies, which are assumed to be from a Hebrew 
gospel. The answer to this is conclusive. The author of the Ho7nilies 
presents at least one passage which is undeniably from John. Of the 
five quotations on which the argument for identity of origin rests, it has 

^ iii. 17. 2 Chronologic, I. 474. 

3 Theol. Lit. Zeitting, 18 (1893), ^o. 2, p. 34. 
* Inspirationy pp. 310, 313. ^ See Semisch, p. 367. 

^ E.g. Apol.y i. 53, where a passage in Isaiah is credited to Jeremiah. 



220 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

been demonstrated that there is no such resemblance as the argument 
assumes to exist.^ What can be the worth of reasoning which, were it 
valid, would compel us to hold that Jeremy Taylor drew his knowledge 
of the teachings and acts of Christ, not from the Gospels of the canon, 
but from a lost Ebionic document? Certain passages of Scripture are not 
unfrequently misquoted in the same way, owing to causes which in each 
case are readily explained. There are, so to speak, stereotyped errors" 
of quotation. Another occasion of greater or less uniformity in verbal 
deviations from the text as we have it is the diversity of manuscripts. 
Attention to the ordinary operations of memory, and more familiarity 
with textual criticism, would have kept out untenable theories of the 
kind just reviewed. 

Justin was a native of Palestine. He may have had some knowledge 
of the Gospel of the Hebrews, as other Fathers had. He may have 
read in it that Jesus made ploughs and yokes, and that a fire was 
kindled in the Jordan at his baptism, although this last tradition is 
differently given in that Gospel.^ There is no proof, however, that he 
picked up these circumstances from any written source. They were 
probably afloat in oral tradition before they found their way into books. 
But there is decisive proof that the Gospel of the Hebrews was not one 
of the Meinoirs which were his authoritative sources. That was a 
gospel of Judaic sectaries, and Justin was not an Ebionite. There is 
not a shadow of reason to suppose that the Gospel of the Hebrews was 
ever read in the churches which he must have had most prominently 
in mind. It is only necessary to observe how he describes ih^ MemoirSy 
to be convinced that the Gospels of the canon are meant. He speaks 
of them as composed by " the apostles and their companions," and this 
he does in connection with a quotation which is found in Luke.^ This 
accounts for his adding the term " companions " to his usual designa- 
tion of these documents. This is the same mode of describing the 
Gospels which we find in Tertullian and in other later writers.^ In one 
place, in the dialogue with Trypho, he calls them collectively "the 
Gospel," — a term applied to the contents of the four, taken together, 
by Irenaeus and Tertullian in the same century. He says, however, 

1 See Professor Ezra Abbot, Critical Essays, " Authorship of the Fourth 
Gospel," p. 103. Professor Abbot's exhaustive investigation has settled the 
question of the derivation of the passage in Justin on regeneration {ApoL, 
i. 61) from John iii. 3-5. Cf., on Justin and the Clementines, Westcott, 
Hist, of the Canon, p. 129 seq., and note D, p. 155; Dr. E. A. Abbot, Encycl. 
Britt.,Yo\. X. p. 818. Hilgenfeld was convinced by Professor E. Abbot's 
essay that John was one of Justin's Gospels. 

2 See Nicholson, The Gospel of the Hebrews, etc., p. 40. The statement is 
found, for substance, in two ancient Latin Mss., and is perhaps alluded to 
by Juvencus, a Christian writer of the fourth century. 

8 Dial.^ c. 103. 4 See Tertullian, Adv. Marc, iv. 2. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 221 

expressly that they are called "Gospels."^ Apart from this explicit 
statement, it is preposterous to imagine that Justin can have one docu- 
ment only in mind in his references to the Memoirs. Was that docu- 
ment the joint production of the "apostles and their companions^' ? 
This would be a case of multiple authorship without a parallel in litera- 
ture. We should have to hold that a gospel comprising in itself the 
contents of the four of the canon was read, in the middle of the second 
century, in the churches " in city and country," and was then, within a 
score of years, silently superseded by four Gospels of unknown author- 
ship, among which its contents were distributed. The ancient docu- 
ment of established authority vanished as if by magic at the advent of 
these newcomers, among whom it was somehow partitioned ! And 
this miraculous exchange, which took place when Irenaeus was not far 
from thirty years old, occurred without his knowledge ! Such an 
hypothesis is too heavy a tax on credulity. Scholars of all types of 
opinion are now disposed to accept the conclusion, which should never 
have been disputed, that Justin used all the Gospels of the canon ; and 
it is safe to predict that there will be a like unanimity in the conviction 
that it is these alone which he designates as Memoirs by the Apostles 
a7id their Companions. "The manner," says Norton, "in which Justin 
speaks of the character and authority of the books to which he appeals, 
proves these books to have been the Gospels. They carried with them 
the authority of the apostles. They were those writings from which he 
and other Christians derived their knowledge of the history and doc- 
trines of Christ. They were relied upon by him as primary and decisive 
evidence in his explanations of the character of Christianity. They 
were regarded as saa'ed books. They were read in the assemblies of 
Christians on the Lord's Day, in connection with the prophets of the 
Old Testament. Let us now consider the manner in which the Gospels 
were regarded by the contemporaries of Justin. Irenaeus was in the 
vigor of life before Justin's death ; and the same was true of many 
thousands of Christians living when Irenseus wrote. But he tells us 
that the four Gospels are the four pillars of the church, the foundation 
of Christian faith, written by those who had first orally preached the 
gospel, by two apostles and two companions of apostles. It is incred- 
ible that Irenaeus and Justin should have spoken of different books." 
When " we find Irenaeus, the contemporary of Justin, ascribing the same 
character, the same authority, and the same authors as are ascribed by 
Justin to the Memoirs quoted by him, which were called Gospels, there 
can be no reasonable doubt that the Memoirs of Justin were the Gos- 
pels of Irenaeus." ^ 

The proposition that Justin's Memoirs were the four Gospels 
is corroborated, if it stood in need of further support, by the fact 
^ Apol., i. 66. 2 Gemdnness of the Gospels, pp. 237, 239. 



222 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

that Tatian, who had been his hearer, and speaks of him with 
admiration/ wrote a Harmony of the Four Gospels. Tatian is 
intermediate between Justin and Irenaeus. He was born early in 
the second century and flourished as an author between a.d. 155 
and 170. In his extant Address to the Greeks are passages evi- 
dently drawn from John's Gospel.^ Eusebius says that, " having 
formed a certain combination and bringing-together of Gospels, 
— I know not how, — he has given this the title Diatesseron ; 
that is, the gospel by the four," etc. The expression " I know 
not how " implies, not that Eusebius had not seen the book, but 
that the plan seemed strange to him.^ It was not a harmony in 
the modern sense, but an amalgamation of passages from the 
Evangelists. At the beginning of the fifth century Theodoret tells 
us that he had found two hundred copies of the work in circula- 
tion, and had taken them away, substituting for them the four 
Gospels. A Syrian writer. Bar Salibi, in the twelfth century, had 
seen the work ; he distinguishes it from another Harmony by 
Ammonius, and he testifies that it began with the words, " In the 
beginning was the Word." A commentary on this Diatesseron^ 
Bar Salibi states, had been made in the fourth century by 
Ephraem Syrus. Up to a recent day, the character of the Diates- 
seron as a combination of the Four was persistently denied by the 
critics of the school of Baur. This criticism has been brought to 
an end not only by the discovery of two distinct Armenian ver- 
sions of the Commentary of Ephraem, but also by the discovery 
of two copies of the Arabic version of the Diatesseron itself.* The 
composition of such a work, in which the four Gospels were 
partly compounded into one narrative, is an independent proof of 
the recognition which they enjoyed, and is an additional proof 
that the same Gospels constituted the Memoirs of Justin. 

There were a few writings, not included in the canon, which were 
sometimes read in the early churches for purposes of edification ; 
and some of these were held by some of the Fathers to have a 
certain claim to inspiration. In this list are embraced the Epistle 
ascribed to Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement of Rome, and the 
Shepherd of Hermas. A book of much less note, an Epistle of 

1 H. E., iv. 29 ; Tatian, Orat. ad. Grcecos, c. 18. ^ cc. 4, 5, 13, 19. 

* See Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 278. 
4 See Zahn's Tatian' s Diatesseron (1881). Harnack assigns it to 172, " if 
not to 160-170." Chronologie, I., p. 722. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 223 

Soter, Bishop of Rome, is also said to have been sometimes read 
in churches ; and there are some traces of a similar use of an 
Apocalypse of Peter ^ which Eusebius and Jerome brand as apocry- 
phal. Not one of these books was a narrative. None of them 
ever had anything like the standing of the documents which re- 
corded the facts in the public ministry of Christ, on which the 
very life of the Church depended. They were read in some of the 
churches for a time; but even Fathers who regard them with 
honor, as is seen in the example of Clement of Alexandria, do not 
hesitate to criticise their teaching.^ The Memoirs of Justin were 
narratives, placed by all the churches on a level with the prophets 
of the Old Testament.^ The gradual separation of the didactic 
writings whose titles have been given from the books of the canon 
does not in the least help us to comprehend how the documents 
referred to by Justin could have been expelled from the churches 
and perished out of sight. 

It is sometimes imagined, if not asserted, that apocryphal Gos- 
pels were widely used in the churches of the second century, and 
enjoyed the esteem accorded to the four of the canon. This is a 
groundless impression.^ The apocryphal Gospels which are now 

1 Clement {Peed., ii. 10, ed. Potter, p. 220) dissents from a statement of 
Barnabas (c. x.). Origen more definitely separates these writings from those 
which are authoritative. Yet at Alexandria there was a stronger tendency to 
accept writings of this class than existed elsewhere in the Church. 

2 ApoL, i. 67. 

^ A concise, instructive account of the New Testament apocryphal literature 
is given by H. J. Holtzmann, Einl. in d. N. T., ed. 3 (1892). He correctly 
characterizes them as " documents, almost all of which are distinguished 
from the canonical writings of the New Testament by the venturesomeness 
and tastelessness {Abentheuerlichkeit und Geschmacklosigkeii) of their contents, 
in great part also by their display of gnostic, sometimes, also, Jewish- 
Christian, or otherwise heretical color." Of the apocryphal Gospels, Holtz- 
mann says: "Not even the gospel of the Hebrews and the gospel of Marcion 
in age go back of the canonical Gospels. Only by misunderstanding could the 
first be made the basis of Matthew, the second the basis of Luke. Much 
more is what we have said true of the writings still extant. As later products 
of pious fantasy by which merely the gaps in the Reports given by the Evan- 
gelists might be filled out, since they only include sections of the evangelical 
history, there was never any danger of their being put by the side of the four 
Gospels " (pp. 486, 487). The whole subject is thoroughly handled in the 
elaborate discussion by Zahn, Geschichte d. N. T. KanonSy vol. ii., pp. 621-797. 
R. Hofmann's article, in Hauck, Realencyd.f'ur. Prot. Theol. u. Kirche, vol. i., 
is condensed and quite valuable. 



224 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

extant, relating to the nativity and childhood of Jesus, and to the 
Virgin Mary, never pretended to be anything more than supple- 
ments to the received Gospels. They are of a much later date 
than the age of Justin. It has been thought that two or three of 
them existed in an earlier, rudimental form at that day.-^ Such 
was the opinion of Tischendorf. But even this is doubtful. The 
Gospel of the Hebrews (not the Hebrew St. Matthew), in its various 
redactions, had a wide acceptance among the different Jewish 
sects. But, this Gospel and Marcion's mutilated Luke excepted, 
there were no uncanonical gospel narratives which we have reason 
to think had any extensive circulation among professed Christians. 
There were no rivals of the Memoirs to which Justin referred. 
Numerous books were fabricated among heretical parties ; but, 
though they might bear the name of " Gospels," they were gen- 
erally of a didactic nature. This is the case with The Gospel of 
the Truth, which Irenaeus and Tertullian inform us had been 
composed by the Valentinians. It is a powerful argument for the 
genuineness of the canonical Gospels, that the Gnostics are con- 
stantly charged with bolstering up their doctrines by perverse 
interpretation of the Gospels, but are not accused of bringing 

1 It may be well to state what apocryphal Gospels present a plausible claim 
to great antiquity. 

The Protevangelium of James treats of the nativity of Mary. Origen re- 
fers to it by name (in Matt., torn. x. 17, ed. Migne, vol. iii. p. 875); but it 
could not be the existing book that he used, as is shown by Professor Lipsius, 
Diet, of Christ. Biogr., ii. 702. Clement of Alexandria {St7'0fn., vii.) is 
thought to have referred to it. There is no proof that Justin (in Dial.., c. 78) 
borrowed from it. Says Professor Lipsius, " There is, indeed, no clear war- 
rant for the existence of our present text of the Protevangelium prior to the 
time of Peter of Alexandria (311)." Gnostic and Ebionitic features are 
mingled in it. 

The Acta Pilati forms the first part of the Gospel of Nicodemus. Justin 
{ApoL, i. 28, 36) refers to the Acts of Pilate, as does TertulHan {ApoL, 21; 
cf. 5). Both have in mind, probably, not any book, but an official report, 
which they assume to exist in the public archives at Rome. Eusebius {H. E., 
ii. 2) refers to a blasphemous pagan forgery under this same title, which was 
of recent origin. The first trace of the present Acts of Pilate is in Epiphanius 
(A.D. 376), Har., 50, I. 

A Gospel of St. Thomas is referred to by Origen {Horn, in Luc, i.). It 
was used by the Gnostic sects of Marcosians and Naassenes (Hippol., Ref. 
Omn. Hcer., v. 2 ; cf. Irenaeus, y^^z^. H(zr., i. 20, i). Portions of this book may 
exist in the extant Gospel of the same name. It relates to the boyhood of 
Christ. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 225 

forward narratives of their own at variance with them. On this 
subject Professor Norton remarks : — 

" Irenaeus and Tertullian were the two principal writers against the 
Gnostics ; and from their works it does not appear that the Valentinians, 
the Marcionites, or any other Gnostic sect, adduced, in support of their 
opinions, a single narrative relating to the public ministry of Christ, 
besides what is found in the Gospels. It does not appear that they 
ascribed to him a single sentence of any imaginable importance which 
the Evangelists have not transmitted. It does not appear that any sect 
appealed to the authority of any history of his public ministry besides 
the Gospels, except so far as the Marcionites, in their use of an imper- 
fect copy of St. Luke's Gospel, may be regarded as forming a verbal 
exception to this remark." ^ 

With the exception of the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, the 
reference to which is contained in a disputed passage of Tertullian, 
it is true, as Professor Norton states, that this Father " nowhere 
speaks of any apocryphal Gospel, or intimates a knowledge of the 
existence of such a book." ^ In all the writers of the first three 
centuries, there are not more quotations professedly derived from 
apocryphal books called by them Gospels than can be counted on 
the fingers of one hand.^ These citations in the Fathers, however, 
involve no sanction of the books from which they are taken. Clem- 
ent of Alexandria quotes the Gospel of the Egyptians, but he quotes 
it to condemn it. If in the second century, as well as later, the 
Gospels of the canon were not the authorities from which the 

1 Genuineness of the Gospels, iii. 222. 

2 Ibid., iii. 227. Tertullian expressly states that Valentinus used all the four 
Gospels (^De Prcescript. IIa;r., c.38). On the same sense of videtur in the 
passages, see Professor E. Abbot, Critical Essays, p. 84. 

3 Origen once quotes a statement from the Gospel of Peter (^Comment, in 
Matt., tom. X. 462, 463). Clement of Alexandria twice refers to statements in 
the Gospel of the Egyptians {Stro?n., iii. 9, 13). In the so-called II. Ep. of 
Clement of Rome are several passages thought to be from this Gospel, but the 
source is not named. See Lightfoot's Clement, ^p^p. 192, 193, 297 j^^., 311. 
Clement of Alexandria thrice {Strom., ii. 9, iii. 4, vii. 13) cites passages from 
The Traditions, which was not improbably another name of the Gospel of 
Matthias. 

Of these authors Pseudo-Qement is the only one who seems to attribute 
authority to the book to which he refers. The Gospel of the Egyptians was 
used by an ascetic sect, the Encratites (Clem. Alex., iii. 9). The Encratite 
tendencies of the Homily of Pseudo-Clement are noticed by Bishop Lightfoot, 
Clement of Rome, Appendix, p. 311. 
Q 



226 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Church derived its knowledge of the life and teachings of Jesus, 
there is no known source whence that knowledge could have been 
obtained. 

Celsus, the most distinguished literary opponent of Christianity 
in the second century, may be joined with the Gnostics as an in- 
direct witness for the Gospels of the canon. He wrote, some have 
thought, as early as Marcus Antoninus (a.d. i 38-161). Keim 
thinks that he composed his book under Marcus Aurelius, in a.d. 
178.^ He had the Christian literature before him. He showed 
no lack of industry in searching out whatever could be made to 
tell against the Christian cause. As in the case of Justin, the 
gospel history can be constructed out of the passages cited from 
Celsus by Origen.^ But there is not an incident or a saying 
which professes to be taken from Christian authorities that is not 
found in the canonical Gospels.^ With all of these, as Keim al- 
lows,* he shows himself acquainted. Had there been apocryphal 
Gospels which had attained to a wide credence or circulation in 
the Church, even at a date thirty or forty years previous to the 
time when he wrote, this astute controversialist would have known 
something of them, and would have been likely to avail himself of 
the welcome aid to be derived from their inventions. 

Passing by other proofs, we proceed to consider one testimony 
to the Gospels which carries us back into the company of imme- 
diate followers of Christ. It is that of Papias, Bishop of Hierapo- 
lis. He is spoken of by Irenaeus as "a man of the old time."^ 
He was a contemporary of Polycarp,^ who was born a.d. 69, and 
died A.D. 155. He had also known the daughters of PhiHp, — 
either the apostle, or (possibly) the evangelist.'' He is said by 
Irenaeus to have been a disciple of John the apostle ; but a 

1 Keim, Celsus' Wahres Wort, p. 273. Zahn fixes the date at about A.D. 
170 {Einl. in d. N. 7'., II. 290); Harnack at A.D. 176-180 (^Chronologie, 

1. 173). 

2 See the summaries of the work of Celsus, by Doddridge and Leland, in 
Lardner's Credibility, etc., ii. 27 seq,, and the work of Keim, as above. 

^Origen (^Adv. Cel., ii. 74) says, "Now we have proved that many foolish 
assertions, opposed to the narratives of our Gospels, occur in the statements of 
the Jew " [in Celsus], etc. But these *' foolish assertions," as an inspection of 
the previous portion of Origan's work demonstrates, are comments on the gos- 
pel history, not pretending to come from any Gospels. 

* p. 230. 6 Irenceus, 1. c. 

^ Adv. Har., v. ^Zi 4* ' Eusebius, H. E., iii. 39. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 22/ 

doubt is cast on the correctness of this statement by Eusebius.^ 
Be this as it may, this is certain, that he knew Aristion, and one 
whom he designates " the Presbyter [or Elder] John," — whom he 
calls " disciples of Jesus." " These may have formed a part of a 
company of apostles and their followers who left Palestine for 
Asia Minor about a.d. 67, on the outbreak of the Jewish war. In 
the passages which Eusebius has preserved from Papias, he speaks 
only of the two Evangelists, Mark and Matthew. The silence of 
Eusebius, however, as to any mention of the third and fourth Gos- 
pels by Papias, has been demonstrated not to imply, in the least, 
that these Gospels were not referred to and used by him.^ The 
avowed purpose of Eusebius in these notices, and his practice in 
other similar cases, would not lead us to expect any allusion to 
what Papias might say of the other Gospels, unless it were some- 
thing new, or of special interest. Now, Papias was informed by 
"the Elder" John, that Mark was the "interpreter" of Peter,'' 
and wrote down accurately what he heard Peter relate of the say- 
ings and doings of Jesus. The same statement respecting the 
relation of Mark to Peter, and the origin of the second Gospel, is 
made by Clement of Alexandria,^ Irenaeus,'' and Tertullian.^ It 
was the undisputed belief of the ancient Church. It is borne out 
by the internal traits of Mark's Gospel.^ It has been maintained 
by some that a primitive Mark, of which the Gospel of the canon 
is an expansion, is the work referred to. On what is this theory 
founded ? First, on the statement in Papias, that Mark, though 
he omitted nothing that he heard, but reported it accurately, was 
precluded from recording " in order " (eV ra^et) the matter thus 
derived from the oral addresses of Peter. But this remark may be 
founded on a comparison of Mark with Matthew, where the say- 
ings of Christ are often differently disposed; or, perhaps, with 
Luke, who specially aimed at an orderly arrangement ; or, possi- 
bly, as Lightfoot thinks, with John, where the sequence of events 

1 Eusebius, 1. c. 2 jf)i(i^ 

' See Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 182. 

* The meaning is not that Mark translated Peter's Aramaic into Greek 
(or Latin), but did the work of an intermediary, conveying to his readers 
what he had heard from Peter. See Meyer, Ev. Markus (ed. Weiss), p. 2; 
and Zahn, Einl. in d. N. T., 218 seq. 

^ Eusebius, ff. E., ii. 15. ® Irenaeus, Adv. I/ier., iii. 10, 6. 

"^ Adv. Marc, iv. 5. 

8 See B. Weiss, Marcusevangelium, Einl., p. 2. 



228 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

is more carefully preserved.^ But it may be nothing more than a 
subjective impression of Papias or of his informant. It would 
seem improbable that any other Mark could have existed in the 
time of Papias and Polycarp, and have been silently superseded 
by the Gospel of the canon, without any knowledge of the fact 
reaching Irenseus and his contemporaries. The second reason 
given for the conjecture respecting an earlier Gospel of Mark is 
founded on a certain hypothesis as to the relation of the synoptical 
Gospels to one another, and to the authorship of the first of them. 
The hypothesis is that Matthew's authorship extended only to the 
compilation of the discourses of Jesus, and that the narrative por- 
tion of his Gospel is from another hand. Papias states that 
" Matthew wrote the oracles (ra Aoyta) in the Hebrew tongue, and 
every one interpreted them as he could." It is in another place 
that Papias, whether following the same or a different authority, 
says of the Evangelist Mark, that, in setting down what he had 
heard from Peter, he wrote accurately whatever he remembered, 
but did not record in order what was either said or done by 
Christ, and that he did not design to give a connected account 
of the Lord's " Logia " (XoytW or Xoywv).^ Since Schleiermacher, 
the theory has been widely accepted by the German critics that 
under the term Logia Papias means exclusively teachings of Jesus. 
The first Gospel in its present form is conceived to be dependent 
on the second for its narrative matter ; yet the reverse is supposed 
to be true respecting certain passages in the two Gospels. Hence 
the inference concerning these passages in Mark that they are 
of a later date than the body of its contents. But, in the first 
place, as Lightfoot has shown, it is quite possible that Papias by 
Logia designates the entire Gospel in its present form.^ Secondly, 
it is quite possible, as Hilgenfeld has thought, and as Zahn main- 
tains, that Papias speaks only of sayings of Christ in Matthew, 
because it was with these that he was specially concerned in his 
own book, the Exposition.^ If Papias regarded the canonical 
Gospel as only in part the work of Matthew, would he not have 

1 Essays on Supernatural Religion, pp. 165, 205. " Per ordinem profitetur," 
says the Muratorian Fragment, after referring to Mark in terms like those used 
by Papias. 

2 Eusebius, H. E., iii. 39. ^ Essays on Sup. Relig., p. 173 seq. 

^ Hilgenfeld, EinL, pp. 54 seq., 456 seq. (Lightfoot, ibid., p. 172); Zahn, 
Einl. in d. N. T., II. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 229 

stated who was the second author? Thirdly, as Weiss and others 
think, if Z^^'^ in Papias means "discourses," the first Gospel 
may, and indeed must, have included, as a subordinate element, 
narrative memoranda connected with them.^ The language of 
Papias distinctly implies that it was no longer necessary to trans- 
late the Aramaic Matthew into Greek. His use of the aorist 
implies that that necessity had passed by. Zahn is justified in 
declaring that if critics must assume a lost primitive Matthew, 
made up of discourses of Jesus, they must rest the case on internal 
grounds, instead of building it on the testimony of Papias.^ If our 
present Matthew is the primitive document amplified, still the 
later author stands, as regards authority and credibility, on a level 
with the second and third EvangeHsts. The date of the completed 
Gospel is proved by internal evidence to coincide very nearly with 
that of the fall of Jerusalem (a.d. 70).^ 

Although the statements cited by Eusebius from Papias relate 
not to Luke, but to Mark and Matthew, it happens that there is 
nearly contemporary evidence of striking value respecting the ex- 
istence and authority of the third Gospel. Marcion came from 
Asia Minor to Rome about a.d. 140.* His heresy involved a re- 
jection of the aposdes, with the exception of Paul, for the reason 
that he deemed them tainted with Judaic error. The Fathers who 
oppose Marcion describe him as having rejected the Gospels, with 
the exception of Luke. He did not deny that the other Gospeb 
were genuine productions of their reputed authors (there is no 
hint that he did) ; but he selected Luke as his authority, he having 

1 Weiss, Matthausevangel.^ Einl., p. 17 seq.y Einl. in d. N'. T., p. 465 seq. 

2 Gesch. d. N. T. Kanons, I. ii. s. 892. 

8 Weiss sets the date of Mark just before A.D. 70 (" in das Ende d. sech- 
ziger Jahren"), Einl. in d. N. T., s. 496; of the primitive Matthew, just be- 
fore the destruction of Jerusalem {ibid., s. 514); of the present Matthew, very 
soon after; of Luke's Gospel, not later than a.d. 80 {ibid., s. 531). Harnack 
assigns to Mark the date A.D. 65-67, to Matthew, a.d. 70-75 {Chronologie, s. 
654). Harnack interprets Papias as referring to earlier written Greek recen- 
sions of a (probably Hebrew) Matthew, one of which was the recognized 
Greek edition prior to Papias (c. A.D. 150, ibid., 693). Harnack holds to 
later additions to the primitive Matthew. The composition of a Hebrew 
Gospel by the apostle Matthew, which is a common source of Matthew and 
Luke, Harnack admits to be possible, but not assured. He rejects the theory 
of a mere collection of discourses (s. 694, note). He assigns A.D. 78-93 as 
the date of the Gospel of Luke and die Acts of the Apostles (s. 250, s. 718). 

* See Justin, Apol. , i. 26, 58. 



230 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

been an associate of Paul, and made a gospel for himself by 
cutting out of Luke's work passages which he considered incon- 
gruous with his doctrinal theories.^ That Marcion's gospel was 
an abridgment of our Luke is now conceded on all hands. Dr. 
Sanday has not only demonstrated this by a linguistic argument, 
but has proved by a comparison of texts that the gospel of the 
canon must have been for some time in use, and have attained to 
a considerable circulation, before Marcion applied to it his prun- 
ing-knife.^ There is no reason to doubt that he took for his pur- 
pose a gospel of established authority in the Church. 

But we have the unimpeachable testimony of the author of the 
third Gospel as to the sources of his knowledge. In the prologue 
he states that his information was derived from the immediate dis- 
ciples of Christ.^ Unless the author who collected and preserved 
such passages of the Saviour's teaching as the parables of the 
Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, and as the story of the 
Pharisee and the Publican, lied, his informants were immediate 
followers of Jesus. His sources were in part writings and doubt- 
less in part oral communications. Moreover, the book of Acts 
undoubtedly has a common authorship with the Gospel. In the 
Acts, the author discloses himself in an artless and incidental way, 
as having been a companion of the apostle Paul in a part of his 
journeying. That this author was Luke is attested by the unvary- 
ing tradition of antiquity. No other explanation of the passages 
in which the writer speaks in the first person plural^ is satisfactory. 
That as practised a writer as the author of these two books un- 
deniably was introduced quotations from another so carelessly is 
quite improbable. For a later writer to take up these quotations, 
and, still more, to assimilate them to his own style, still retaining 
the " we," would be a flagrant attempt at imposture.^ Had a later 
writer wished to cozen his readers into a belief that he had been 
an attendant of Paul, he would not have failed to make his preten- 
sion more prominent. The literary discernment of Renan on a 
question of this nature, which stands apart from any theological 

^ Tertullian, De Prescript. Hcer., c. 38. 

2 The Gospels in the Second Century, ch. viii. The priority of Luke to 
Marcion's gospel is admitted in the seventh edition of Supernatural Religion. 

3 Luke i. 2. * Acts xvi. 10-19, ^x. 5-xxviii. 31. 

5 This intention was attributed to the author by leaders of the Tubingen 
School, as it is in the Encyclopcedia Biblica, art. " Acts of the Apostles." 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 23 1 

idea, is not to be lightly esteemed. " The author of this gospel 
[Luke] is certainly the same as the author of the Acts of the 
Apostles." ^ " The book [of Acts] has a perfect unity of composition 
{redactioii), and it is this which decides us to attribute it to the 
personage who says ' we ' ("^/w-et?) from xvi. 4. For to admit that 
this ' we ' comes from a document inserted by the author in his 
narrative is in the highest degree {souveraine?nent) improbable. 
The examples which they cite of such a negligence pertain to 
books of no literary worth, well-nigh undigested ; but the Acts is a 
book composed with a great deal of skill {beaucojip d'arf) . The 
favorite expressions where the ' we ' occurs are the same as those 
of the rest of the Acts and of the third Gospel."^ To conclude, 
there is the same consensus in the tradition respecting the associa- 
tion of Luke with Paul that we find with regard to the connection 
of Mark with Peter.^ 

The evidence, the most important points of which have been 
sketched above, establishes the essential genuineness of the first 
three Gospels. We have, however, within these Gospels them- 
selves, indirect proofs of their early date of a convincing char- 
acter. The most important of these internal evidences is the 
form of the eschatological discourse of Jesus. In Matthew espe- 
cially, but also in the other synoptical Gospels, the second advent 
of Christ is set in close connection with the destruction of Jerusa- 
lem.'* Most candid scholars at present prefer the hypothesis that 
the reports of the Lord's Discourse — which, it must be remem- 
bered, are translations of it into Greek, and in an abridged form 
— are colored by a subjective anticipation of the disciples, the 
result of their own thoughts and yearnings with regard to a point 
left indefinite in the Lord's prophetic teaching, the design of which 
was to afford glimpses of grand turning-points in the development 
of his kingdom. " If Christ," says Neander, " pointed forward 
to the great effective forces or steps involved in his coming in 
the world's history, his victorious self-revelation, bringing in his 

1 Vie de Jesus, 1 6™° ed., p. xlix. The author of both works is "bien reelle- 
ment Luc, disciple de Paul." Les Apbtres, p. xviii. 

2 Les Evangiles (1877), p. 436, n. 2. 

* Irenseus, Adv. Hcer.,\\\. i, i; TertuUian, ^i/z/. Marc, iv. 2; cf. Ep. to 
Philemon, ver. 24; Col. iv. 14; 2 Tim. iv. ii. For further remarks on the 
relation of Luke to the Gospel and the Acts, see Appendix, Note 12. 

* Matt. xxiv. 29, 34 ; Mark xiii. 19, 24, 30 ; Luke xxi. 32. 



232 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

kingdom, he meant thereby in part his triumph in the fall of the 
previous sensuous form of the theocracy, and in the more free 
and mighty spread of this kingdom, to be secured by it, and in part 
his last coming for the consummation of his kingdom. He had 
in view the judgment of the degenerate theocracy, and that final 
judgment, — the one being the first more free and mighty develop- 
ment of the kingdom of God, the other its final consummation ; 
both being regarded by him as events corresponding one to the 
other, — just as in general, in the great epochs in the world's 
history, God reveals himself, sitting in judgment on a creation 
ripe for its downfall, and calKng a new creation into being. Of 
this character are the critical and creative epochs of the world's 
history, having relation one to another; while collectively they 
prefigure that epoch when the judgment is completed, and with it 
the creation of the divine kingdom. ... It is easy to understand 
how it might happen that in apprehending and reproducing such 
discourses of Jesus, from the standpoint of the hearers, the succes- 
sive epochs or stages which Christ exhibited in a certain corre- 
spondence with one another, and which, although he did not 
designate measures of time, he kept more apart, should become 
mingled with one another." Weiss is constrained to concede 
such a dislocation in the case of Matt. xxiv. 35. It is generally 
conceded, that in the Logia of Matthew there are clear examples 
of a grouping together of utterances of Jesus on separate occa- 
sions. The Sermon on the Mount is an illustration. That the 
synoptical reports of the Prophetic Discourse should exhibit 
traces of the feeling, spontaneous in its origin, that the Return of 
Christ was to be soon, is a plausible supposition. We cannot be 
sure, from anything recorded in the Gospels, that Jesus spoke 
explicitly of the fall of Jerusalem as a " coming " on his part. 
But this term was used by him not always in reference to the 
same event. In the fourteenth chapter of John, in the third 
verse, it is held by both Meyer and Weiss that the " Coming " of 
which Jesus speaks is the Parousia, while in the eighteenth verse, 
the *' Coming " of which mention is made is held by Meyer to 
refer to the mission of the Comforter, or Paraclete, — by Weiss, to 
the Resurrection ; and Weiss concedes that in the twenty-third 
verse the " Coming " refers to the spiritual communion into which 
he was to enter with the disciples. Here, then, in a single chap- 
ter of John, the " Coming " of Jesus is applied to three distinct 



THE GOSrELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 233 

manifestations of himself. That a misconception of the meaning 
of Christ on the subject was possible on the part of disciples 
is shown by an example in John xxi. 23. That Jesus did not 
foretell his advent to judgment as an event to follow immediately 
upon the destruction of Jerusalem is shown by the parable of the 
Marriage Feast, in Matt, xxii., and by the parable of the House- 
holder (Matt. xxi. 33-42), unless it is assumed that the reports of 
these parables are here given in a later, expanded form. The 
same conclusion is distinctly indicated in the parables of the 
Mustard-seed and the Leaven, not to speak of other teaching of 
like purport. The legislation in the Sermon on the Mount ap- 
pears to be in its tone inconsistent with the idea of a sudden and 
speedy advent to judgment. Jesus is said to have declared 
that he did not himself know when it would occur. " But of that 
day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, 
neither the Son, but the Father only " (Matt. xxiv. 36). Of course 
it is possible to interpret " day and hour " with strict literalness. 
Under this interpretation, the passage would prove nothing to our 
purpose. But at another time, after the Resurrection, when he 
was asked if he was at once to restore the kingdom to Israel, he 
answered that the question related to a secret of the Almighty : 
*' It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father 
hath set within his own authority" (Acts i. 7). They were to 
carry their testimony, he added, " unto the uttermost part of the 
earth." Here we see the eagerness of the disciples for the con- 
summation of the kingdom, side by side with the assurance of 
Christ that the date when their hopes would be realized was an 
unknown, unrevealed fact in the divine administration. At the 
same time, it will not be questioned by the soundest interpreters, 
that, had any considerable interval elapsed between the capture of 
Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70, and the composition 
of the synoptical Gospels, other phraseology would have been used 
by the Evangelists, or at least some explanation thrown in respecting 
the chronological relation of that event to the advent to judgment. 
We have, therefore, in the passages referred to, satisfactory evi- 
dence that the first three Gospels were in existence, if not before, 
at least very soon after, a.d. 70. And the same reasoning proves 
that they existed in their present form and compass. The es- 
chatological discourse in Matthew, for example, is homogeneous in 
style with the rest of the Gospel ; and, in any revision later than 



234 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the date given above, these perplexing statements would not have 
been left unaltered or unexplained. 

Besides the eschatological discourse, there are many passages 
in the first three Gospels, sayings and occurrences, which imply 
the state of things which preceded the fall of Jerusalem and did 
not exist afterward.^ The Gospels have a vocabulary •^— and in 
this particular the fourth is included — which is characteristic of 
them, as distinguished from the Epistles and the rest of the New 
Testament. One example is the use in the Gospels of the term 
" Son of man." Another example is the use of Christ, not as a 
proper name, but as signifying the Messiah. The term " church," 
so frequent later in the New Testament, is found in the Gospels 
only in two places in Matthew. Questions pertaining to Church 
officers and ecclesiastical controversies and customs are wholly 
absent from the Gospels. The atmosphere in these narratives is 
quite different. It belongs to an earlier time. 

The long and searching inquiry on the question of the origin and 
mutual relations of the first three Gospels has not been without 
substantial results. The great influence of an oral tradition which 
shaped itself at Jerusalem, where the apostles remained for years, 
and whose repetition of the Lord's sayings and acts would tend to 
acquire a fixed form, is now generally acknowledged. The inde- 
pendence of Mark in relation to the other Evangelists is an assured 
fact. The priority of Mark in respect to date of composition, if 
not so unanimously accepted, is favored by a large body of learned 
scholars. Leading English critics are disposed to claim for the 
oral tradition a larger agency in accounting for the resemblances 
of the Synoptists to one another than German critics consider it 
possible to assume. Westcott favors the hypothesis that Matthew 
wrote his Gospel in the Aramaic ; that the Aramaic oral tradition 
which he took up had its contemporaneous parallel in a Greek 
oral tradition ; that, about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, 
the Aramaic Gospel was not exactly rendered into Greek, but its 
contents exchanged for the Greek oral counterpart ; that the dis- 
ciple who thus transferred the Aramaic first Gospel of Matthew 
into Greek added here and there certain historical memoranda. 
In this way he would account for the resemblances of the matter 
contained in the Synoptists.^ 

1 For good remarks under this head see Sanday, Inspiration (Bampton 
Lectures, 1893), P- 284 seq. 

2 Westcott, Introduction to the Gospels, pp. 213, 214, 231 n. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 235 

Weiss, in common with most critics of the German school, of 
whom he is one of the most eminent, holds that the peculiarities 
of the Synoptists cannot be explained by the influence of oral 
tradition alone. We must assume an interdependence. His view 
is, that the oldest Gospel was an Aramaic writing of Matthew, 
composed mainly, but not exclusively, of discourses of Christ, 
arranged in groups ; that this was rendered into Greek ; that, 
immediately after the capture of Jerusalem by Titus, it was 
ampHfied by historical matter, drawn mainly from Mark, — the 
second Gospel having been previously written, as the ecclesiastical 
tradition affirms, by the same Mark who had attended Barnabas 
and Paul, and who afterward was a companion of Peter ; that the 
third Gospel was composed by Luke, the companion of Paul, who, 
in addition to other sources of information, written and oral, made 
use of the oldest document, the writing of Matthew, and the nar- 
rative of Mark; that Luke's Gospel was composed not much later 
than the " first decennium after a.d. 70." ^ 

From the foregoing statements it will be seen how small, com- 
paratively, is the divergence of the different schools of judicious 
critics, so far as their conclusions have a bearing on these essential 
points connected with the historical evidences of Christianity. 
The early formation, under the eyes and by the agency of the im- 
mediate disciples of Jesus, of an oral narrative of his sayings and 
of the events of his Hfe ; its wide diffusion ; its incorporation into 
the second Gospel, prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, by an 
author who had listened to Peter ; the authorship of the basis, at 
least, of the first Gospel by the Apostle Matthew ; the completion 
of the first Gospel in its present compass not far from the date of the 
fall of the city and the consequent dispersion of the Christians, 
who fled at the coming of the Romans ; the composition of Luke 
by a Christian writer who had access to immediate testimony, as 
well as to writings in which this testimony had been set down 
by disciples situated like himself, — these are facts which erudite 
and candid scholars, both German and English, whose researches 
entitle them to speak with confidence, unite in affirming. 

A few words may be said upon the integrity of the Gospels. 
The guarantee of this is the essential agreement of the existing 
manuscripts, which would not be possible had the early texts been 

^ Weiss, I.eben Jesti, B. i. 24-84. Weiss thinks also that some traces of the 
primitive Matthew appear in Mark. 



236 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

tampered with. Renan speaks of the little authority which the 
texts of the Gospels had for about a " hundred years " ; in his first 
edition he wrote " a hundred and fifty." " They had no scruple," 
he adds, " about inserting in them paragraphs combining the nar- 
ratives diversely, or completing some by others. The poor man 
who has but one book wishes it to contain everything that comes 
home to his heart. They lent these little rolls to one another. 
Every one transcribed on the margin of his copy the words, the 
parables, which he found elsewhere, and which moved him."^ 
There is a foundation for these statements, but they are exagger- 
ated. There is no proof that the Gospels were treated with this 
degree of license. Had they been so treated, the differences con- 
sequent must have perpetuated themselves in the copies derived 
from the early texts. With regard to Renan's solitary example of 
an insertion of any length, — Johnviii. i-ii (he might have added 
one more, Mark xvi. 9-20), — these passages are doubted, or re- 
jected from the text, by scholars, mainly on this very ground of 
a lack of manuscript attestation. No doubt, here and there mar- 
ginal annotations, made for liturgical purposes, or from some other 
innocent motive, have crept into the text. The close of the Lord's 
Prayer (Matt. vi. 13) — " For thine is the kingdom," etc. — is such 
an addition. In the second century the diversities in the copies 
of the canonical Gospels were considerable.^ It is the business 
of textual criticism to ascertain what readings are to be preferred. 
The statement that the early Christians felt no interest whatever 
in keeping the text of the Gospels intact is unfounded.^ 

1 Vie de Jesus, 13th ed., p. iv. 

2 See Westcott's History of the Canon of the New Testament, p. 149 seq, 

^ Other statements, in the same connection, have even less foundation. 
"They attached little importance," says Renan, "to these writings," — Gos- 
pels; "and the collectors (conservateurs), such as Papias, in the first half 
of the second century, still preferred to them the oral tradition." On the con- 
trary, the work of Papias was itself a commentary on the Gospels, or on 
portions of them. In his remarks about his esteem of oral tradition, he is not 
comparing the Gospels with other sources of information, but probably refers 
to anecdotes respecting them and their authors which he interwove in his 
comments, and which he preferred to derive from oral sources. See Eusebius, 
H. E., iii. 39. Renan's reference to Irenaeus {Adv. Hcer., iii. cc. 2, 3) proves 
nothing to the purpose. It contains no hint of a preference of tradition to 
the Gospels. Renan further says, " Besides the Gospels that have reached 
us, there were others " — in his first edition he wrote " a multitude of others " 
— "pretending equally to represent the tradition of eye-witnesses." How 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 237 



Note 

The question of the authorship of the third Gospel is involved in 
that of the authorship of the book of Acts. Moreover, so much is 
said at present respecting the authorship of the Acts and the cred- 
ibility of its contents, that, on this account also, these topics deserve 
special notice. The unvarying tradition of the Church ascribes 
both books to Luke — the same Luke whom the apostle Paul 
styles as one of his fellow-laborers,^ and refers to as the beloved 
physician,^ and who is spoken of in the Second Epistle to Timothy 
as the only companion of the apostle at the time this Epistle was 
written. It has already been remarked, that no interpretation of 
the " we passages " in the Acts is probable which does not regard 
them as a record of personal observations of the author of the 
book. 

The principal basis of the impeachment of the genuineness of 
the Acts is the alleged improbability of a portion of its historic 
contents. The theory that the book was composed late with the 
intent to pacify the contention of Petrine and Pauline factions 
in the early Church is so nearly obsolete, the existence of such 
a rupture and antagonism being itself a fiction, that a bare allusion 
to it is all that is required at present. Whatever similarity is found 
in the acts and fortunes which the narrative assigns severally to 
the two apostles, it is only what might be expected if they were 
both active in the same work in different fields, — which, as the 
apostle Paul himself states, was the fact.^ If the author of the 
Acts felt an interest in this parallehsm, or even if he selected 
events illustrating it, the resemblance is naturally accounted for. 

None of the histories in the New Testament has called out in a 
greater degree than the Acts the criticism inspired by suspicion, 
which, as Lightfoot has said, is not more sensible when applied to 
historical writers than when applied to one's neighbors. The 
omission to set down incidents of which we are informed else- 
little warrant there is for this statement respecting apocryphal Gospels, and 
how erroneous is the impression which it conveys, have been shown in preced- 
ing pages of this chapter. The " many " writings to whom Luke refers in his 
prologue were soon superseded, and passed away. There is no proof that any 
one of them had a wide circulation. There were left no competitors with the 
Gospels of the canon, and none arose. 

1 Philemon, vs 24. 2 (^qI. iv. 14; 2 Tim. iv. 11. *Gal. ii. 7, 8. 



238 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

where — the precarious argument from silence — has been made 
the basis of quite unwarranted inferences in dealing with this book. 
Whatever may be true as to alleged inaccuracies in Luke's narra- 
tive, archaeology, in numerous instances, confirms its correctness 
in a striking way. Lightfoot, who is not inclined to exaggerate, 
says of the Acts of the Apostles, " In the multipHcity and variety of 
its details it probably affords greater means of testing its general 
character for truth than any other ancient narrative in existence ; 
and in my opinion it satisfies the tests fully." ^ Much has been said 
of certain discrepancies which are said to exist between the Acts 
and the Pauline Epistles. This implies what, aside from this alle- 
gation, is obviously true, that the narrative is not framed on the 
basis of the Epistles, but quite independently. The Horce Faulifice 
of Paley, the most original of his apologetic works, presents, in a 
convincing way, undesigned coincidences which verify statements 
in the Acts, and so far the trustworthiness of the author. As 
regards accuracy, the distinction must be kept in mind between 
the earlier portion of the book and the later portions. For the 
earlier chapters the sources of information, although they included 
written statements, were indirect and in part oral, so that a less 
degree of precision here and there might be expected. Light- 
foot's observation is especially true of the later chapters. Of the 
difference between these and the earlier. Professor Ramsay ob- 
serves : — 

" In the later chapters there are few sentences that do not afford some 
test of their accuracy by mentioning external facts of life, history, and 
antiquities. But the earlier chapters contain comparatively few such 
details.^ The author had means of knowing the later events with perfect 
accuracy (so far as perfection can be attained in history), but the means 
which helped him there, and the scene and surroundings, were to him 
strange and remote." ^ " We discern the same guiding hand and mind, 
the same clear historical insight seizing the great and critical steps ; but 
the description of the primitive church wants precision in the outline 
and color in the details." ^ " Luke was dependent here on informal 
narratives and on oral traditions." 

Of the first chapters in the Acts, a most competent American scholar, 

^ Apt illustrations follow this statement, Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, 
p. 105; St. Paul and the Three. 

2 St. Paul, the Traveller and the Rovian Citizen, p. 19. 

8 Ibid., p. 367. 4 Ibid., p. 370. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 239 

the late Professor J. Henry Thayer, remarks: "The writer is honestly 
endeavoring to record facts and truths,^' according to the information he 
had received. " On any sensible view the discrepancies are of no great 
account except as evidence of independence, and of substantial trust- 
worthiness." ^ 

There are characteristics of style in Luke that should be taken into 
account, which, however, must not be confounded with important 

— much less intentional — error. An occasional hyperbole is not 
a serious offence in an author. An instance is the reference, in 
words ascribed to James, to the tens of thousands — "myriads" 

— of Jewish believers present at Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 20). An- 
other example is the statement relative to the giving up of private 
ownership, as if it were universal (Acts iv. 32, 34), — a statement 
which subsequent passages in the Acts incidentally restrict {e.g. 
Acts xii. 12). The author's pen was not that of a statistician. 
There are not wanting, however, cases where the narrative is 
made graphic by explanatory details woven into it. Thus (in 
Acts iv. 15, 16) we read that the Jewish rulers, after having 
arraigned Peter and John, put their heads together, as a present- 
day writer might say, and agreed that a miracle had without 
doubt been wrought, and that, as they could not deny it, they 
could do nothing but silence the apostles with threats. A confer- 
ence, such as their proceeding was conceived to imply, is intro- 
duced, as if it were an ascertained fact (Acts iv. 15-17). So it 
may have been ; yet it may be an inference due to Luke's inform- 
ants, which it would have been more accurate in them to state 
less positively, as a probable supposition. In the account of the 
speaking with tongues (Acts ii.), the amazed people connect with 
the question " How hear we in our own language " an enumera- 
tion of all the many regions from which they had come. This is 
an expanded paraphrase of exclamations of the excited throng. 
Our confidence in Luke is confirmed by his insertion of the same 
event with variations of detail. He felt bound no more than any 
other author to bind himself to an identity in phraseology. But 
it is necessary in certain instances to presuppose a difference of 
sources. Luke takes no pains to harmonize the details. The 
most striking instance is the three accounts of the conversion of 
the apostle Paul (Acts xx., xxii., xxvi.). Here the apostle's own 
account addressed to Agrippa (ch. xxvi.) is to be regarded, of 

1 From The Congregationalist, July 6, 1901. 



240 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

course, as of primary value. The extended speeches in the Acts 
are generally, as concerns their phraseology, a composition of the 
author. The ancient writers, as all scholars know, were in the 
habit of throwing into the direct form — the oratio recta — or 
the form of quotation, what a modern writer presents in form, as 
well as in fact, in his own language.^ They are, doubtless, 
in some instances abbreviated, or given for substance merely. 
Yet there is no reason to regard them with distrust ; on the 
contrary, they often have an obvious verisimilitude which speaks 
for the fidelity of the report. This is eminently true, to men- 
tion one instance, of the discourse of Paul at Athens. Much 
has been made of a supposed anachronism in the speech 
attributed to Gamahel (Acts v. 34 seq.^. He is represented to 
have appealed to the example (among others) of the abortive 
sedition of Theudas, which, if Josephus is right, occurred later 
than the date of Gamaliel's speech. On this passage Neander 
says : — 

" It is very possible that at different times two persons named 
Theudas raised a sedition among the Jews, as the name was by no 
means uncommon. ... It is also possible that Luke, in the relation 
of the event which he had before him, found the example of Theudas 
adduced as something analogous, or that one name has happened to be 
substituted for another. In either case it is of little importance." ^ 

Neander's comment illustrates the spirit of sound historical criti- 
cism. It is in sharp contrast with the superficial habit of not a 
few critics, whose method, if followed, would discredit most his- 
torical writings. 

The idea (in Acts ii.) of what the speaking with tongues in the 
churches was, is said to be a misinterpretation which could not 
have been entertained by a companion of the apostle Paul. Ac- 
cording to the apostle it was the excited utterance of inarticulate 
sounds which only those made competent by a gift of the Spirit 
could interpret.^ But in the Acts, the speaking with tongues at 
Pentecost is represented as speaking in foreign languages. But 
a mistake respecting the nature of the phenomenon as it appeared 

1 A special, instructive discussion, by Tholuck, of the speeches of Paul in 
the Acts is in the Stud. u. A'rzVzi., (1839, II.). 

2 Neander, Planting and Training of the Church (ed. Robinson), p. 46. 
8 I Corinthians xii. 10 seq.^ xiv. i seq. 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 24 1 

in the apostolic churches would be as difficult to account for, 
were it made by any other to whom the book of Acts could rea- 
sonably be ascribed as by its reputed author. By some of the 
exegetes the passage is understood to signify that the miracle 
consisted not in speaking but in the hearing — which is the term 
used in the text. Wendt, who adopts this view, suggests that the 
utterances were probably distinct from any existing language, and 
yet such as to open the way for the miraculous comprehension 
of their import.^ Perhaps the account in Luke was current as 
a popular tradition. Professor Thayer takes this view.- " The 
writer " [Luke], he says, " is honestly endeavoring to record 
facts and truths. Even when he obviously labors under misappre- 
hension, as in the case of the gift of tongues (ii. 5 seq.), he gives the 
story as he doubtless received it (compare Mark xvi. 17) without 
attempting to remove its obvious incongruities," etc. Professor 
Ramsay also writes of Acts ii. 5-1 1, that a " popular tale seems to 
obtrude itself. In these verses, the power of speaking with tongues 
... is taken in the sense of speaking in many languages. Here 
again we observe the distorting influence of popular fancy." ^ 

The principal allegation adverse to the trustworthiness, and so 
to the accepted view, of the genuineness of the Acts is that of 
an inconsistency of the account of the apostolic conference 
or council (in Acts xv.) with the apostle Paul's own statement 
(in Gal. ii.) as to his relations to the other apostles and to the 
Jewish Christians generally. Paul, in this place, relates only a 
private interview, but his language implies that there was, besides, 
a public conference. There is no contradiction here. That the 
three apostles, Peter, James, and John, after hearing him describe 
his evangelic work and its fruits, gave him the right hand of fellow- 
ship and bade him God-speed in his mission to the Gentiles he 
emphatically asserts. Nor is there any inconsistency between his 
statement that they " added " or " imparted " nothing to him — 
that is, in the way of supplement or criticism — and the prescrip- 
tions which were sent, according to Acts xv., to the Gentile 
churches in the neighboring region. The one thing insisted upon 
by Paul, that the Gentile believers should not be required to be 

^ Wendt, Apostelgeschichte, ad loc. That there was a speaking of foreign 
languages is not confirmed by the phraseology in Acts x. 47, xi. 15, 17, xix. 6. 
- As cited above. 
^ St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, p. 370. 

R 



242 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

circumcised, was settled according to his mind. This was the 
question respecting which the conference was held. The require- 
ments or requests which were sent forth contained nothing at 
variance with any teaching of the apostle Paul concerning what 
was right and proper to be done or to be left undone by Gentile 
converts who lived in the midst of Jewish believers. It was a 
modus Vivendi for the two classes of Christians, a provision for 
securing cordial recognition as fellow-Christians from those who 
kept up the observances of the Mosaic laws — observances, so far 
as born Jews were concerned, which the apostle Paul counte- 
nanced. It was understood that Peter's special mission was to be 
to the Jews — to " the circumcision " — and Paul's to the Gentiles. 
At a later day, when Paul had planted the Gospel far beyond the 
limits of " Syria and Cilicia," and was giving counsel to churches 
principally made up of Gentiles, his omission to make formal 
reference to the letter of the council or to consider it, under the 
circumstances, appHcable, require no explanation or defence. 
Yet the counsel which he gave, even then, was substantially in 
accord with its terms. In making his collection for the poor at 
Jerusalem he made no reference in his Epistles to the agreement 
which he had made with the other apostles to do so. It was still 
quite possible that James should continue to regard the letter as 
defining what was to be generally expected of the Gentiles (Acts 
xxi. 25). The fault which the apostle Paul found with Peter at 
Antioch was not that Peter differed from him in principle, but 
that he was unfaithful to his own convictions, and by departing 
from the liberal course which he had before pursued was likely to 
make a misleading impression on the Gentile believers. The idea 
of some critics that Paul at Antioch had converted Peter to his 
own liberal view, and that, therefore, the entire narrative (in 
Acts X. I seq^ of the connection of Peter with Cornelius is 
unhistorical, has no foundation. Such a transaction as that de- 
scribed in Acts X. I seq. enables us to explain Peter's preparation 
of mind for the cathoHc course taken by him subsequently. The 
imagined "enlightenment" of Peter by persuasions of Paul at 
Antioch is without a grain of historic evidence to rest upon. If 
the events described in the story of Peter and Cornelius, of which 
we are furnished with so detailed an account, are discredited, it is 
a remarkable instance of the "lie circumstantial." As to the 
demand then made at Antioch by zealous Jewish Christians from 



THE GOSPELS AN AUTHENTIC RECORD 243 

Jerusalem, — whether or not they were in accord with a feehng of 
James we cannot be sure, — it did not clash with the concessions 
which James had made at the council, for these did not touch on 
the question whether Jewish believers should go so far in fraterniz- 
ing with the Gentiles as to disregard the traditional prohibitions 
to eat with tiie uncircumcised, even though they were acknowl- 
edged as Christian brethren and were even loved as such. If the 
apostle Paul was disposed to take a broader view of the spirit 
of the Jerusalem missive, it was a difference of interpretation 
which might naturally arise between two men so unlike in their 
natural qualities. The refusal of Paul to circumcise Titus has 
been made an argument to disprove the historical truth of the 
account in Acts of the circumcision of Timothy (Acts xvi. 1-4). 
It is said that Paul would not have done at one time what he 
absolutely refused to do at another. But why did he refuse to 
circumcise Titus ? First, because he was a heathen by birth, and 
secondly, because his circumcision was demanded on doctrinal 
grounds, so that to yield would have been to give up at once the 
rights of the Gentiles and the truth of justification by faith. But 
Timothy was the son of a Jewish mother, and " all knew that his 
father was a Greek," and he was circumcised for a totally different 
reason from that for which the circumcision of Titus was demanded. 
Timothy was circumcised out of respect to unconverted Jews, not 
converted judaizers. His circumcision neither imperilled the free- 
dom of the Gentiles, nor conflicted with the doctrine of justification. 
In this act Paul simply made himself " a Jew unto the Jew." 
That is, he followed his maxim of making himself all things to all 
men — so far as no principle was violated.^ The circumcision of 
Timothy as truly illustrates the principles of Paul as the circum- 
cision of Titus would have contradicted them. 

The substantial correctness of the narrative of the action 
of the Jerusalem conference as it is given in the Acts is placed 
beyond reasonable doubt by one consideration. From what is 
known of James and is conceded by critics of every school, we 
may be sure that he could not have been satisfied with less in 
the way of concession on the part of the Gentile converts than the 
result of the conference called for. It is equally certain that the 
apostle Paul would never have consented to the requirement of 
more. And we know from Paul's own lips that the two apostles 

^ I Cor. ix. 20 seq. 



244 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

joined hands in fraternal fellowship. In connection with the 
Jerusalem conference there are debated questions of chronology, 
but these are of minor importance. Enough that nothing can be 
shown to affect the general credibility of the Acts or the view as 
to its authorship which was entertained in the Church from the 
beginning.^ 

1 The truth of the account given of the council in Acts is urgently main- 
tained by critics who are least of all open to the suspicion of an apologetic 
bias. Such are Keim, Aus dem Urchristenthum, pp. 64-89, Mangold, in Man- 
gold-Bleek, Einl. in d, JV. T., p. 300 n. Even Weizsacker, who makes 
much of what he regards as difficulties in Luke's narrative, concedes the his- 
torical fact of the decree as its contents are given by him. See Das Aposto- 
lischesZeitalter, p. 179. For remarks which evince here a sound historical 
perception, see Wendt in Meyer-Wendt, Apostelgeschichte, ad. c. xv. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

It is plain to every observant reader that the fourth Gospel has 
certain marked points of unlikeness to the first three. This fact 
is the occasion of the controversy as to its apostolic origin. The 
reasons assigned for doubt or explicit denial on this point are en- 
titled to candid attention. Not to prejudice the case, it is yet 
right to remind the reader that the situation is one where the 
weapon of the assailant is liable to be turned against himself. For 
the greater the contrast between this Gospel and the other three, 
the more serious, perhaps — if the Gospel be not genuine — may 
be the task of accounting both for the creation of such a narrative 
and for the acceptance of its authority in the place and at the period 
of its origin, and by the churches, far and wide, in the Roman Em- 
pire. Moreover, it is conceivable that this evident contrast should 
be more than balanced by deeper, even if less obvious features of] 
resemblance. 

The ordinary belief respecting the apostle John has been derived, 
first, from the Synoptic Gospels, secondly, from the contents of the 
fourth Gospel, and thirdly, from the ancient ecclesiastical writings. 
From these sources it is ascertained that the father of the apostle, if not 
wealthy, was possessed of a competence, and in his occupation, which 
was that of a fisherman, employed hired laborers. His home was by 
the Sea of Galilee, a sheet of water which was girded by a circle of 
prosperous cities.^ The adjacent region was peopled by a dense popu- 
lation, spirited and thriving, mostly made up of Jews. But it was 
covered by a network of roads, and was traversed by the great commer- 
cial route from Damascus to the Mediterranean, which passed into 
Phoenicia, a land " half Greek," the busy centre of manufactures and 
trade. Galilee could be no stranger to Graeco-Roman traits and ways 

^ An excellent description of Galilee is given by Professor G. A. Smith, His- 
torical Geography of Palestine. See, also, S Merrill, in Hastings's Dictionary 
of the Bible, art. "Galilee, Sea of"; and, by the same author, Galilee in the 
Time of Christ. 

245 



246 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

that overspread the lands on the east and westward to the seacoast. 
John had the nurture which Jewish youth usually received in a religious 
household and from schools connected with the synagogues. His spirit 
is indicated by his presence on the banks of the Jordan, a devout listener 
to the preaching of John the Baptist. Introduced there to Jesus, and 
called afterward to be his permanent follower, he appears in the Synop- 
tics as one of the three most prominent apostles, a leadership which, St. 
Paul informs us, he retained later, when James, the brother of the Lord, 
had taken the place of one of them. He is depicted in the earlier 
period as being of a temperament fervid, even to the point of vehe- 
mence, yet with another, but not at all incongruous, phase of character, 
a sensibility and a gentleness which especially endeared him to Jesus. 
After the death of the Master he is seen standing with Peter before the 
Sanhedrim, both speaking with a fearless confidence that excited wonder 
in this tribunal. By them the two apostles are stigmatized as an " un- 
learned and ignorant couple," — by which is not meant that they are 
plebeians or weak-minded, but that they are not possessed of the learn- 
ing of the rabbis — much as a body of official clergy might look down 
upon a brace of laymen not versed in the lore of the schools, yet as- 
suming to instruct their superiors. The second period in the career of 
the apostle John begins under circumstances greatly altered. The 
Jewish nation is prostrated by the Roman conquest. The temple is in 
ruins. The apostle has found a home in the heart of a Gentile commu- 
nity, in an atmosphere where Christian disciples are more or less affected 
by Hellenistic influences. He is the venerated guide of a group of 
churches differing in some of their characteristics from Christian socie- 
ties of a predominantly Jewish cast. Here, in the closing decades of 
his life, as the century draws to its end, it falls to his lot to commu- 
nicate, orally and in writings, the facts in the life of Jesus of most interest 
to himself and of most profit to his disciples, and to set forth that por- 
tion of the teaching of Jesus which lay nearest his own heart. 

Down to a comparatively recent date the apostolic authorship 
of the fourth Gospel had been virtually undisputed. The soli- 
tary exception of a handful of dissentients in the ancient period 
was in a form and under circumstances which deprive it of the 
shghtest weight as an historical testimony. This is perceived by 
noteworthy scholars, such as Zeller, notwithstanding that they 
themselves hold the same negative opinion. This Gospel has 
been prized by the most gifted minds in the Christian Church 
as the pearl of the Evangelic histories. An early Father, Clement 
of Alexandria, in whom genius was united with wide and varied 
learning, characterized it as "the spiritual Gospel" that followed 
after the other three, which had dealt more with the external 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 24/ 

aspects of the life of Jesus. By none has this estimate been more 
emphatically reechoed than by Luther, who pronounced it the 
unique, tender, preeminent Gospel, far excelling the other three.^ 

The genuineness of the fourth Gospel was called in question by 
one or more of the later English Deists, and occasionally about 
a century ago, on the continent, by individuals of Httle account. 
More stir was made in 1820 by the publication of Bretschneider, 
a more prominent theologian of the rationalistic type, who after- 
wards partially disavowed his opinion. With the rise of the Tii- 
bingen School of critics, near the middle of the century just 
closed, the polemic against the generally accepted view of the 
authorship of the Gospel began to be waged with a much larger 
outlay of learning and ingenuity. The shock occasioned by the 
advocacy, in different quarters, of the anti-Johannean view is hable 
unquestionably to give to the defence of the ordinary conserva- 
tive view an apologetic bias. On the other hand, certainly the 
earlier pioneers of the negative opinion, and the later, includ- 
ing Strauss and Baur, are properly classified under the head of 
Rationalists, in the usual acceptation of the term, with whom 
there is, to say the least, a natural and surely an equally unscien- 
tific prepossession adverse to an opinion which, if sound, affixes 
to the testimony in this Gospel respecting facts and doctrine the 
seal of an apostolic witness of the first rank. 

The rejection of the Jobannean authorship, so far as we need to 
notice it here, began with the essay of Baur in 1844.^ His idea of 
the fourth Gospel was part and parcel of his theory of the philos- 
ophy of history in general, and of the evolution of Christianity in 
particular. Christianity was held to be a development on the 
plane of nature, which passed through successive stages, matching 
the abstract scheme of the Hegelian logic. Baur's theory con- 
cerning the Gospel is at least definite and intelligible. He did 
not wage, as many do, a guerilla warfare on received opinions. 
His view is that the book is an idealized history, a mixture of fact 
and fiction. The author was at once devout and speculative. He 

^ " . . . ist Johannis Evangelium das einzige, zarte, recht Hauptevangelium, 
und den anderen dreien weit, weit vorzuziehen und hoher zu heben." It has, 
adds Luther, fewer events and more preaching (predigt). Luther's Vorrede 
N. r., ed. 1545. 

2 In Zeller's Jbb., 1844, vol. i. pp. 2, 3 ; Kritisch. Untersuch. iib. d. kanonisch. 
Evangg., 1847. 



248 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

was a Gnostic who cherished a certain conception of the Logos or 
Word, beheved in the identity of the Logos with the historic Jesus, 
and aimed to exhibit this identity in a fictitious narrative of a 
symbohc character. The book then is a theological romance com- 
posed for this end, and at the same time to bring together diverg- 
ing theological parties. 

The historic material, much of which is in the main a creation of the 
author, presents in the concrete his idea of the Logos. The distinction 
made between "light" and "darkness" becomes in the Gospel a bold 
dualism. The principle of darkness is embodied in the Jews, and the 
development of their unbelief is made to keep pace with the progressive 
manifestation of Christ, or of the Logos in Christ, which provokes it. 
External events, especially miracles, are merely a sensuous counterpart 
or mirror of "the idea" — a kind of staging set up by the author to be 
forthwith pulled down. One design, we are told, is to show the nullity 
of a faith which is produced by miracles. They are introduced into the 
Gospel as a crutch brought in for the sake of being cast aside. 

On this theory, how shall we conceive of the mental state of the 
Evangelist ? We are assured that he is sincere ; that in imagination 
he identifies himself with the apostle John; that so far as doctrine is 
concerned, he writes as he feels that John would write were he alive. 
In short, he is absorbed in a series of pictorial views {Anschauungen 
und Bilder) of the grandest and most significant character. In the 
course of his work on this Gospel, Baur not infrequently intimates that 
the author in his own consciousness well-nigh confounds fancy with 
fact. He loses himself, as it were, in the symbols of his own creation. 
He is in a kind of waking dream. The artistic product took on the as- 
pect of reality, so spontaneously did it grow out of the idea, its living 
germ. Fancy Bunyan to have been so far carried away in composing 
the allegory of Pilgriui's Progress that his tale aff"ected him as if it were 
actual history. Something like this state of mind is seriously attrib- 
uted by Baur to the author of the fourth Gospel. In this way the con- 
clusion that the work is a fruit of wilful imposture was escaped. Baur 
was constrained to date the Gospel as late as 160 or 170. Otherwise 
leaps would be requisite in the room of a continuous progress of his- 
toric development. He had great capacity as a critic, but he was under 
the sway of a theological bias. Hence his fabric as a whole, notwith- 
standing much that was admirable in parts, was built upon the sand. 
The main postulate of his system is practically without adherents. 
Neither John nor Peter was a judaizer. Neither demanded that Gen- 
tile converts should be circumcised. There was no such cleft in the 
Church, no such warfare of parties, as Baur assumed to exist. There 
was no rupture to call for a series of doctrinal efforts at compromise 
such as were said to have been the motive of several of the New Tes- 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 249 

tament writings. The proposition that the primitive type of Christian- 
ity was Ebionitic is an historical mistake. 

At present so late a date as Baur assigned for the composition 
of the fourth Gospel meets with no favor. Among the critics who 
do not accept the Johannean authorship there has been a pretty 
steady retreat from one historic decade to another. Zeller fixed 
the date at 150, Hilgenfeld at 140, Keim at 130, Renan and 
Schenkel from no to 115. Lightfoot's prediction that the time 
would come when it would be deemed discreditable in any critic 
** to assign the Gospel to any later date than the end of the first 
century or the very beginning of the second" is well-nigh fulfilled. 
"Between 95 and 115," is the conjecture of Moffatt.^ Professor 
McGiffert holds that the Gospel, in case it was not written by the 
apostle, must be pushed " back as far as the early years " of the 
second century.^ Harnack, who has few peers in ability and 
learning, puts it as far back as from 80 to no. But this recession 
must be admitted to carry in it the danger of shipwreck for the 
theory of non-apostolic authorship in all its phases. Either of the 
new dates brings the time of composition into perilous nearness to 
the living apostle himself, unless we reject ancient and well- 
accredited tradition that he lived down to the reign of Trajan 
(a.d. 98). Keim met the exigency thus arising by casting overboard 
the universal tradition of the abode of the apostle at Ephesus. 
This intrepid scepticism was withstood by Hilgenfeld and other 
representatives of the Tubingen criticism, and among others, by 
one of the ablest of the advocates of the non-apostolic authorship, 
Weizsacker. A chief point in the Tubingen scepticism had been 
the behef that the Apocalypse is genuine, and is incompatible with 
the Johannean authorship of the Gospel. This school was not 
disposed to surrender its conviction that the apostle lived and 
taught in Asia Minor. 

In the ensuing pages notice will be frequently taken of opinions 
of Baur on the Johannean question, for the reason that, notwith- 
standing a prevalent dissent from so much that he contended for, 
his special judgments and interpretations frequently reappear in 
critical discussions.^ 

1 Historical N. T., p. 495. 2 Apostolic Age, p. 614. 

^ Jiilicher, one of the more extreme of the recent German critics, calls the 
fourth Gospel "a philosophical fiction" ("eine philosophische Dichtung"). 
Einl. in d. N. T., p. 258. 



250 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

As regards the use of the Gospel by particular writers in the 
second century, if students would remember how scanty often are 
the early references to ancient classical writers of celebrity, they 
would be less sceptical and less exacting in relation to the princi- 
pal New Testament writings, and would be more impressed by the 
strength of the attestation furnished us of their genuineness. Ap- 
pian, a very eminent man, published his Roman History about 
A.D. 150. The first reference to it in literature is in the sixth 
century. ^ Keim conceded that the fourth Gospel was among the 
gospels known to Marcion, that Justin Martyr has quotations from 
it, that it antedated the Epistle of Barnabas and the Ignatian 
epistles, and that its use is manifest in the extant literature of the 
Church as early as the use of the first three Gospels.^ Mangold 
went almost as far. He candidly avowed that there is no defect 
in the external evidence.^ In the brief survey of the evidence 
which is to follow, it will be taken for granted that the Gospel and 
the first Epistle are from the same pen. Baur and Hilgenfeld 
maintained the negative ; but the dissent of these critics from one 
another on the question, which was the prior work and which the 
later, is an argument for the identity of authorship, — an opinion 
which is supported as well by convincing internal evidence as by 
the uniform tradition. 

We begin with a notice of the early historic testimonies. Euse- 
bius, in the first quarter of the fourth century, having in his hands 
much of the earliest Christian literature which has perished in the 
shipwreck that befell ancient writings, knew of no dispute respect- 
ing the origin of this Gospel. It stands on his list of Homolo- 
goumena — New Testament books universally accepted.^ It is in 
the Ancient Syriac version, and in the Old Latin version of North 
Africa — documents not later than the end of the second century. 
Origen, one of the most erudite of scholars, whose birth (from 
Christian parents) took place within the limits of the second cen- 
tury (in 185), counts it among the Gospels "not disputed in the 
church under the whole heaven."^ Clement of Alexandria, in 
consonance with Irenaeus, his contemporary, relates what he had 
heard from the oldest presbyters. John, he says, wrote a " spir- 

^ White, Translation ofAppian, Preface, p. 3. 

2 Geschichte Jesu, i. 137. 

8 Mangold-Bleek, Einl. in d. N. T. (ed. 3), p. 281, n. 

* H. E.f vi. 25. ^ Eusebius, H. E., vi. 25. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 25 1 

itual Gospel," being prompted thereto by his friends and impelled 
by the Spirit.^ The Muratorian Fragment gives with more detail 
a tradition of like purport. The apostle had been exhorted to 
write, it tells us, by his fellow-disciples and bishops. In Justin 
Martyr we find passages which it is in the highest degree probable 
that he found in this Gospel. From no other authority could he 
have derived his doctrine of the person of Christ.^ It formed 
one of the four Gospels amalgamated in the Diatessaron of Tatian, 
who was Justin's pupil.^ Theophilus, a contemporary of Tatian, 
who became Bishop of Antioch, a.d. 169, describes the fourth 
Gospel as one of the Holy Scriptures, and John as guided by the 
Holy Spirit."* He wrote a commentary on the Gospels, and in a 
way combined the four in a single work.^ Athenagoras, a con- 
temporary of Theophilus, speaks of Christ in terms which are 
obviously founded on passages in this Gospel.'' Melito, Bishop 
of Sardis, a contemporary of Polycarp and of Papias, referred to 
the ministry of Jesus as lasting for three years — a fact for which 
his authority could hardly have been any other than the fourth 
Gospel.^ Another contemporary, ApolUnaris, Bishop of Hierapohs, 
indirectly but manifestly implies its existence and authority.^ 
Celsus, the most noted of the literary opponents of Christianity in 
the second century, resorted to the fourth Gospel, as well as to 
the first three, to get materials for his polemic.^ There is some 

1 Eusebius, H. E., vi. 14. 

2 See this work, p. 214. Professor Ezra Abbot, in his Essay on The 
Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (^Critical Essays, pp. 9-107), comes as near 
to a demonstration of its use by Justin as the nature of this species of evidence 
permits. See pp. 22 seq., 63 seq., with the notes. He shows that the inac- 
curacy in Justin's quotation of John iii. 3 occurs, e.g., repeatedly in Jeremy 
Taylor. 

* Ibid.,-^. ^4 seq. "Justin, his [Papias's] younger contemporary . . . em- 
ploys our four Gospels as directly or indirectly apostolic. Occasionally he 
takes up an uncanonical tradition. . . . The fragment of the Gospel of Peter 
(100-130 A.D.) dispelled all theories which made this the source of Justin's 
quotations, and identified it with his Memoirs of Peter (i.e. Mark). . . . Cas- 
cara's publication forever settled all questions as to which four had been thus 
employed, and showed their relative standing." B. W. Bacon, An Introduc- 
tion to the N. T., pp. 45, 46. 

* Ad Autolicuin, ii. 22. ^ Hieron., De Viris illustr., 25 ; Epp., 151, 
^ Sup pi. pro Christanis, c. lo. 

'^ See Otto's Corpus ApoL, t. ix. p. 416. 

^ Chron. Pasch., pp. 13, 14. ^ See above, p. 226. 



252 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

reason to think that it was used by Hermas ; ^ and perhaps some 
traces, though less distinct, of its use are in the Epistle ascribed 
to Barnabas.^ Polycarp, in addition to the proof of his use of the 
Gospel, which is to be inferred from what we learn of him from 
Irenaeus, inserts into his own short Epistle to the Philippians a 
passage which is found in no other book but the first Epistle of 
John.^ As to Papias, there is not the least evidence to disprove 
his acquaintance with the fourth Gospel ; for the silence of Euse- 
bius on this topic affords not the faintest presumption that Papias 
made no mention of it.* But Eusebius does expressly state that 
Papias used the first Epistle of John,^ which is evidently from the 
same author as the Gospel ^ — this Epistle being one of the Catholic 
Epistles the use of which by the early writers was a point which Euse- 
bius was interested to record.^ The testimony of Irenseus has already 
been adduced. He cites from " elders," venerated persons, the 
contemporaries of Papias, an interpretation of the words of Christ 
in John xiv. 2, and attributes to these worthies an idea relative to 
the length of the Saviour's ministry, which was suggested by a 
misinterpretation of John viii. 57.^ These testimonies traverse 
the century. They carry us back to the lifetime of contempo- 
raries and disciples of John. Finally, appended to the Gospel 
itself is the endorsement, which comes from those into whose 
hands it was first given (John xxi. 24), and which without doubt 

^ SimiL, ix. 12; cf John x. 7, 9, xix. 6 ; Mand., xii. 3 ; cf. i John v. 3. 
The argument of Dr. C. Taylor, Witness to the Four Gospels (1892), is not 
void of weight. 

2 Keim takes the affirmative ; but see Luthardt, p. 76 ; Sanday, Gospels in 
the Second Century, pp. 270-273 ; Cunningham, Dissert, on the Ep, of Barna- 
bas, etc., p. 60. 

^ Ad Phil., 5. 

* See Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 32 seq. The chapter 
of Lightfoot on " The Silence of Eusebius " sweeps away numerous false 
inferences, which are current, of a piece with that concerning Papias. 

^ Eusebius, H. E., iii. 39. 

^ " No two works in the whole range of literature show clearer signs of 
the genius of one writer, and no other pair of works are so completely in a 
class by themselves, apart from the work of their own and of every other 
time." Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire, p. 302. 

'^ The Didache (cc. ix. x.) contains passages of a Johannine cast, prob- 
ably based on the Gospel. The special arguments of Resch are deserving of 
attention. See Appendix, Note 13. 

8 Adv. Ilcer., v. 36, 2, ii. 22, 5. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 253 

refers to John the apostle. There is no pretence that it was 
forged. 

We have still to glance at the evidence afforded by the parties 
without the pale of the Church. Tertullian distinctly implies that 
Marcion (a.d. 140) was acquainted with John's Gospel, but dis- 
carded it because he would acknowledge no other of the apostles 
than Paul.^ We have little direct information respecting the canon 
of the Montanists, but unquestionably their doctrine sprang partly 
from what they read of the Paraclete in the fourth Gospel. The 
Basilidians and the Valentinians, gnostic sects which arose in the 
second quarter of the second century, made use of it ; the Valen- 
tinians, Irenaeus tells us, made abundant use of it. They sought to 
bolster up their opinions by a misinterpretation of its contents.^ 
Heracleon, a follower of Valentinus, wrote a commentary upon it, 
from which Origen quotes largely.^ Tertullian explicitly says that 
Valentinus himself used all of the four Gospels.'* Irenaeus nowhere 
implies the contrary. So far from this, a study of the context 
shows that Valentinus is not of the class who rejected any of the 
four. There is Uttle room for doubting that Hippolytus, a pupil of 
Irenaeus, derived those comments upon certain places in the 
Gospel which he quotes, from Valentinus himself, and not from a 
disciple of his. There is no pretext for such a doubt concerning 
his references to Basilides.^ BasiHdes flourished under Hadrian 
(a.d. 1 1 7-138). Valentinus came to Rome about a.d. 140. 
Heracleon composed his commentary about a.d. 160. In the 
middle of the second century, the debate was carried on between 
the Church and the gnostic heresiarchs. Justin shows the strongest 
antipathy to Marcion and his followers, the Valentinians, Basilidians, 
and the sect of Saturninus.^ Their doctrines he denounces as 
blasphemous. Now all of these parties on the one side, and the 
stanch defenders of orthodoxy on the other, accept in common 
the fourth Gospel. The Gnostics did not dispute its apostolic 

1 Adv. Marcion, iv. 3, cf. c. 2 ; De Came Christi, c. 3. 

2 Adv. Hcer., iii. 2, 7. 

* For Origen's references, see Grabe, Spicilegium, vol. ii., or Stieren's ed. 
of Irenaeus, i. 938-971,0. 38. 

* Tertullian, De Prcescriptione Htrrret. For the sense of videtur in the 
passage, see this work, p. 208. 

^ Hippolytus, Ref. ojnn. Har., vi. 30, vii. 22, 27. See Prof. E. Abbot, 
Critical Essays^ p. 85 ; J. Drvunxnond, /otirn. Bibl. Lit. (1892), pp. 133-159. 
® Dial., c. 35 ; cf. ApoL, i. 26. 



254 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

authorship, but resorted to artificial interpretation of its contents. 
The church teachers in confuting them had no heavier task than 
to expose the fantastic character of their exegesis. The Gnostics, 
however, made so much of the Gospel, and turned it to such a 
use, that had there been a plausible pretext for doubting its apos- 
tolic authorship, the temptation to do so would have been very- 
strong. The beginnings of the Gnostic controversy are as early 
as the Apocalypse, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistle to the 
Colossians. Who was ingenious enough to frame a book of such 
a character as to suit both the contending parties? If the author 
of the work was known to have been an apostle, no explana- 
tion is called for, inasmuch as the Gnostics, Marcion excepted, 
did not profess to set aside the authority of the apostles.^ 

Mention has been made of the contention of Keim, that the 
ancient ecclesiastical writers — we might say, ail antiquity — made 
the mistake of confounding the apostle John with another person 
of the same name, "John, the Presbyter." This supposition is 
entitled to attention, chiefly for the reason that it has received 
some countenance from so eminent a scholar as Harnack.^ It has 
to meet a formidable obstacle which it would require very definite 
proof to sustain, in the testimony of Irenseus. Of especial inter- 
est is the letter of Irenseus to one Florinus, whom he in his youth 
had personally known, but who had embraced heretical opinions. 
The letter dwells on the acquaintance which both had had with 
Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, who died as a martyr in 155 or 156, 
at the age of eighty-six. The letter reads as follows : — 

*' I saw thee when I was still a boy, in Lower Asia in company with 
Polycarp, while thou wast faring prosperously in the royal court, and 

1 In the power of realizing the situation and its possibilities, in the epoch 
adverted to, no scholar in Church History excels Neander. In a passage in 
his Life of Jesus, he gives in forcible terms his judgment on the question here 
considered. See Appendix, Note 14. 

2 It should be stated that Harnack, as might be expected, is not insensible 
to the difficulties that beset this hypothesis, even when the one fact, which is 
allowed to admit of no question, is considered, that " at the end of the second 
century, not Irenaeus alone, but the * Asia Minor Christians ' [" Kleinasiaten "] 
generally held John, the son of Zebedee, to be the author of the Gospel." Die 
Chronologie d. altchristl. Lit., i. 668. But the suggestion is risked that the 
story of the identity of this author with John the apostle was started and 
spread by Presbyters at Ephesus. Lbid., pp. 679, 680. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 255 

endeavoring to stand well with him. For I distinctly remember the 
incidents of that time better than events of recent occurrence ; for the 
lessons received in childhood, growing with the growth of the soul, 
become identified with it ; so that I can describe the very place in 
which the blessed Polycarp used to sit when he discoursed, and his 
goings out and his comings in, and his manner of life and his personal 
appearance, and the discourses which he held before the people, and 
how he would describe his intercourse with John, and with the rest who 
had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their words. And what- 
soever things he had heard from them about the Lord, and about his 
miracles, and about his teaching, as having received them from eye- 
witnesses of the life of the Word, he would relate altogether in accordance 
with the scriptures. To these [discourses] I used to listen at the time 
with attention by God's mercy which was bestowed upon me, noting 
them down, not on paper but in my heart ; and by the grace of God, I 
constantly ruminate upon them faithfully." ^ 

Exactly how old Irenseus was at the time to which these reminis- 
cences refer, we do not know. The Greek word for boy (Trats) is 
a term which admits of the supposition that he was not less than 
eighteen or twenty. The Greek for " our first youth," an expression 
of Irenaeus in another place, frequently signifies " manhood," and 
would not be out of place if he had reached that period of life. 
It is a safe conclusion, from all the evidence, that his birth occurred 
as early as 130.^ Even if it be assumed that at the time referred to 
he was not more than fifteen years old, the material point is that 
his recollection of the circumstances mentioned in the letter was 
perfectly distinct. That by the " John " to whom Polycarp referred, 
Irenaeus understood the apostle of that name, — the same to whom 
he and his contemporaries attributed the authorship of the fourth 
Gospel, — no one doubts. 

The new hypothesis to account for the ascription of the author- 
ship of the fourth Gospel to the apostle John is that Irenaeus 
misunderstood Polycarp ; that he was really speaking of another 
Ephesian of the same name, and that in the second century the 
two Johns came to be confounded. Papias, among his sources of 
information of which he makes mention in the passage cited by 
Eusebius, names John the apostle, and then, a little later, two 
" disciples of the Lord," Aristion and the " Presbyter [or Elder] 

1 Lightfoot's translation, Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 96. 
^ Zahn would place it as eady as 115. 



256 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

John." It is possible that Papias, perhaps from inadvertence, 
mentions the apostle twice — the prefix in the last instance not 
being an official title, but used, as it often was, to signify the 
veneration in which a Christian worthy was held. Such is the 
opinion of some scholars deserving of high respect. But the more 
probable, as it is the more common opinion, is that a second John 
is meant, and that " Elder " is used by Papias as a designation of 
the office held by him in the Church. In this case the question 
is, was Polycarp talking not of the apostle, as Irenseus without a 
shadow of doubt supposed, but of this " Elder " ? Can this be 
believed ? Even if Irenaeus was a boy of fifteen, it is clear that 
his attention had been riveted on the declarations of Polycarp. 
They were of absorbing interest to him. His recollection of them 
was too vivid to be inexact. Polycarp's " manner of life," " his 
personal appearance," the "place where he used to sit," were 
stamped upon his memory. It was not a single interview that he 
remembered. "I used to listen," ''where Polycarp used to sit," 
"how he would describe his intercourse with John and with the 
rest who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their words " 
— these are the terms in which the eager and admiring pupil 
described his teacher. It is not formal addresses like modern 
sermons that Irenaeus speaks of. Polycarp told those who gath- 
ered about him what he had heard from John and from " the rest 
who had seen the Lord," "about the Lord," "his miracles and 
his teachings." "There must have been," as Professor Gwatkin 
observes, " a great difference in the stories themselves, and cer- 
tainly in the telling of them, between the Lord's own apostle and 
the Elder John who did not belong to the inner circle of his disci- 
ples."^ It is a large tax upon credulity when we are invited to 
believe that Polycarp, all this while, was talking of some other 
John than the apostle. Even were it supposable that Irenaeus 
himself misapprehended Polycarp to this extent, were there no 
other listeners about him among his acquaintance to set him 
right? Were there none, in the East or the West, in all the years 
that followed, to open his eyes to so egregious an error? There, 
for example, was Pothinus, with whom at Lyons Irenaeus was 
associated as a presbyter, and whom, on his death in 177, at the 

1 Gwatkin, " Irenoeus on the Fourth Gospel," The Contemporary Review, 
vol. 71 (1897, !•)» P* 226. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 257 

age of ninety, Irenseus succeeded in the episcopal office.^ Harnack 
does not question the fact that Irenaeus knew nothing of any 
other John in Asia but John the apostle.^ The confusion of 
names in the case of PhiHp the apostle and Phihp the evangelist, 
in which Eusebius shared, furnishes no parallel to such an error 
on the part of Irenaeus.^ 

But what is known of the " Presbyter " John ? He is apparently 
a much more notable person in the German criticism of the present 
day than he was in his own time or later. 

As we have said, he is probably on the list which Papias gives of his 
informants respecting apostolic times. Later in the century, Clement 
of Alexandria and Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, like Irenaeus, knew 
nothing of such a person.* About 250, Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, 
hazards the conjecture that the Apocalypse — a book which he regarded 
with great disfavor on account of its teaching, or what he took to be 
such, on the millennium — was written by another of the same name as 
the apostle. He has no other reason for this surmise except that he 
had heard of there being two tombs at Ephesus, each having the name 

^ Irenaeus is not free from inaccuracies in his references to traditions. It 
is a rash and false inference which imputes to him in general a want of trust- 
worthiness. The most noteworthy instance of error is in the passage in 
which he says that the ministry of Jesus did not terminate until he was forty 
years old. Probably this idea was mistakenly deduced from John viii. 58, 
" Thou art not yet fifty years old," etc. This chronological supposition was 
not unlikely at the basis of the statement of the " elders," to which Irenaeus 
refers in support of it. However improbable, it was not an impossible im- 
pression, for nothing in John's Gospel definitely excludes it. The phrase " all 
the elders " may be an overstatement. See on this case of inaccuracy. Light- 
foot, ^w^jj on Supernatural Religion, p. 246. On the loose and exaggerated 
charges of inaccuracy against the Fathers generally, see, also, Lightfoot's 
protest and the proofs brought forward by him, especially the comparison of 
the Fathers in this respect with Tacitus and other contemporary classical 
authors. Ibid., p. 268. Other references to the life of John are in Irenaeus, 
iii. 3, 4, ii. 2, 5, iii. 3,4. 

Reville, Quatrihjie Evangile, etc. (1901), p. 13, says of the Letter of 
Irenaeus to Florinus, " We see that the apologetic prepossession (preoccupa- 
tion) never leaves him." He is credited by Reville with being concerned, in 
order to save Florinus and others from heresy, to make it out that he has 
known in his childhood some one who knew the apostles, etc. Few 
students of Irenaeus need any answer to this imputation. 

2 Chronologic, etc., p. 673. 

^ See what is said of Polycrates above, p. 26. 

* " Sie von einem anderen Johannes in Asien nichts wissen." So Har- 
nack, Chronologic, i. p. 673. 
S 



258 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

" John " inscribed on it.^ Of course there might have been two distinct 
monuments of the apostle in different parts of the city or the suburbs. 
Be this as it may, Dionysius says nothing of the " Presbyter " John, 
whom he would not have omitted to mention here had he ever heard 
of him. Nor, with the sole exception noted above, is there a hint of 
his existence in any ecclesiastical writer prior to Eusebius (about 325). 
And even what Eusebius has to say of him is probably an echo of 
the remark of Dionysius. The little that is said after Papias of 
the possibility of a second John at Ephesus springs out of doctrinal 
objections to the contents of the book of Revelation. If the "Pres- 
byter" John was a person of so high consideration as it must be pre- 
supposed that he was, in case he was known to be the author of the 
fourth Gospel, and if he was the subject of detailed reminiscences in 
public discourses of so celebrated a man as Polycarp, how account for 
the well-nigh universal silence respecting him.? 

If it was of the " Presbyter " that Polycarp talked in public 
addresses, at least there must have been numerous hearers who 
did not misunderstand him. We must not forget other connec- 
tions of Irenseus with this venerated martyr. In an admonitory 
letter of Irenaeus to Victor, Bishop of Rome, he referred to a 
visit of Polycarp to that city (a.d. 155), and to the appeal which 
Polycarp then made to instruction which he had received respect- 
ing the observance of Easter from John and other apostles.^ If 
Irenaeus erred in this statement, it would have been evident at 
Rome, where the occurrences at Polycarp's visit would be remem- 
bered. It is not alone from Polycarp directly that Irenaeus was 
informed of his recollections of John. The story of the apostle's 
meeting the heretic Cerinthus in the bath, he had heard from 
individuals to whom Polycarp had related it.^ Not Polycarp alone, 
but other "elders" — worthies of a former day — who had also 
known John, are referred to by Irenaeus. Polycarp was not the 
sole link connecting him with the apostle. He had before him 
the work of Papias, in which, if anywhere, the apostle was distin- 
guished from the presbyter of the same name. Of this we may 

1 Jerome speaks of two tombs at Ephesus, each inscribed with the name 
of John. But he considers them both memorials of the apostle (^De Viris III., 
c. 9). Says Dr. McGiffert, "The existence of two such memorials in Fphesus 
by no means proves that more than one John was buried there." See Dr. 
McGiffert's ed. of Eusebius, iii. 39, n. 13. 

2 Irenaeus, ed. Stieren, Fras^menta, iii. p. 826. 
^ Ibid., Adv. Hczr., iii, 3, 4. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 259 

be sure that neither Irenaeus nor Eusebius found anything in Papias 
not consisfeftt with the apostolic authorship of the Gospel. If 
Irenaeus was mistaken, of which we cannot be certain, in saying 
that Papias himself had been taught by the apostle, this will not 
justify the imputing to him of a like mistake respecting Polycarp, 
with whom he had had personal intercourse of the character 
described by him.^ 

The fact of the residence of the apostle John at Ephesus, and 
of his wide influence in that region, is not open to reasonable 
doubt. Renan even goes so far as to say that we should have to 
suppose a falsehood on the part of Irenaeus if we held that John 
did not live in Asia.^ Other witnesses besides Irenaeus testify to 

1 However Weizsacker errs on certain points, his observations on the sus- 
pected confusion of names and on other connected points are sound and con- 
vincing. Between the case of Polycarp and Papias, the great difference lies 
here, that " Irenaeus nowhere refers to information which he had received 
from Papias. To infer a mistake in the case of Polycarp is therefore un- 
warranted." " That Irenaeus does not mention the other John, furnishes no 
reason for thinking that he confounded him with the apostle. The whole 
weight which Irenaeus lays upon the apostolic character of his John contra- 
dicts the assumption. Not even that this second John had been in Ephesus 
has an older witness for it. From the words of Papias we find that he [the 
second John] came down to his time ; from which it follows that he also stood 
in point of time much too near Irenaeus to render it possible for him to be 
confounded by him with the apostle." Even if Papias did not err in placing 
him in the apostolic instead of the next following generation, the expla- 
nation of the Johannean writings would not be a hair easier than if they 
came from the apostle John. The nail is too weak to hang upon it the 
whole Johannean tradition. Weizsacker, Das Apostolisches Zeitalter (ed. 2), 
pp. 480-482. 

What Eusebius says (iii. 39) contains no proof that Papias was a hearer of 
the Presbyter John or of Aristion. What Eusebius here says in one sentence 
he virtually retracts in the next. The language in the quotation of Eusebius 
does not imply that Papias had personally known either of them. 

^ Les Evaiigiles, p. 425, n. 2. 

The attestation of Polycrates (Eusebius, H. E., iii. 31) is thought by some 
to be weakened in value by a confusion of names, which he may have shared 
with others, in regard to " Philip," whom he refers to as " one of the twelve 
apostles who sleeps in Hierapolis." The broad use of the term " apostle," 
coupled with the fact of the truly apostolic labors of the Evangelist of this 
name, might naturally give rise to this confusion, in which even Eusebius and, 
later, Augustine, partake. See Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, art. 
" Philip the Apostle " ; McGiffert's ed. of Eusebius, ad loc. That it was the 
apostle who died at Hierapolis is the opinion of Lightfoot {Colossians, p. 45 ; 
App. Fathers ; Ignatius, i. p. 422 ; Colossians (ed. 3, 1879), p. 46). The 



260 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the sojourn of the apostle there, — Apollonius an Asiatic bishop 
and an early writer; Polycrates, who was born as early as a.d. 125, 
a bishop of Ephesus, seven of whose relatives had also been bish- 
ops; Clement of Alexandria, who relates the incident — whether 
it be true or not is now immaterial — of John's conversion of the 
apostate youth who had become a robber.^ Other early legends 
relating to the apostle imply at least the knowledge that he had 
lived at Ephesus. Justin Martyr, who was a native of Palestine, 
was acquainted with Christians in Asia as well as at Rome. We 
know that in the year 135 he sojourned at Ephesus. Now Justin 
says that the apostle John wrote the Apocalypse. It matters not, 
as concerns the question now before us, whether in that particular 
he was correct or not. It is certain, from its contents as well as 
from the tradition, that at Ephesus or in its neighborhood the book 
of Revelation was written. This book was undoubtedly ascribed 
to the apostle. It would not have been, had he not been known to 
have lived there. Keim is one of the critics who admit that the 
author of the Gospel, whoever he was, proceeded on the supposi- 
tion that John had lived in Asia Minor ; so that on their own views 
of the date of the Gospel, early in the second century the belief 
must have prevailed that the apostle had dwelt there. The traces 
of the influence of John in Asia were distinct and permanent. 
There was in reality, as Lightfoot has shown, a later " school of 
John " — a class of writers coming after Polycarp and Papias, and 
including Melito of Sardis, Claudius Apollinaris, and Polycrates 
— who bear incontestable marks of the peculiar influence of the 
apostle's teaching.^ Weizsacker, whose critical views on many 
important points are opposed to those of Lightfoot, is equally 
impressed with the proofs of a prevalent type of thought traceable 
to this apostle. He dwells on the variety of these evidences and 

name of Philip is in the list of apostles in the fragment of Papias (Eusebius, 
H. E., iii. 39). The arguments of Lightfoot appear to me to have weight. 
But whether Polycrates was correct or not in this designation, Polycrates was 
not bishop in Phrygian Hierapolis, but in Ephesus, and had exceptional ad- 
vantages for being familiar with the main facts to which he adverts. If 
Philip the evangelist was a personal disciple of Christ, — and there is noth- 
ing in Acts to preclude this supposition, — he might the more easily have 
been confounded with the apostle by Polycrates as well as by others. See 
Zahn, Einl. in d. N. T., ii. p. 573 (n. 3). 

1 Eusebius, H. E., v. 18. 

2 Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, vii. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 26 1 

on the personal influence of the apostle which they presuppose.^ 
Professor Loofs, a learned and impartial scholar, speaking of the 
influence of the Johannean teaching, says : — 

" In regard to scarcely one point in the sphere of the History of 
Doctrine, ought the Church to be as much interested as in this. For 
here is presented a line of tradition within which the particulars, charac- 
teristic of the theology of a Biblical Book, — the Gospel which Luther 
styled ' the unique, tender, principal Gospel,' — manifest their influ- 
ence, proceeding from a definable centre and source, within the sphere 
of the History of Doctrine. The ' Introductions,' to be sure, which 
take the Fourth Gospel for a philosophical after-birth of the Evangelical 
literature, are fond of talking of the scanty traces of the Gospel of John 
in the period prior to 150-, but in truth there is no Biblical book whose 
influence, in the History of Doctrine, can be traced so clearly from the 
time of its composition, as that of the Gospel of John." 

Loofs calls attention to the distinct influence of the Johannean 
conception of Christ on Ignatius, in connection with the close 
relation of this Father to Asia Minor.^ 

The statements of Irenaeus, who was in a position to ascertain the 
fact respecting the prolonged life of the apostle, are confirmed by the 
traditions incorporated in ancient ecclesiastical writers to which refer- 
ence has been made. Clement's account of the rescue of the outlaw 
chief, and Jerome's interesting narrative of the aged apostle's method 
of addressing his flock, indicate a general belief that his life was pro- 
tracted to extreme old age. 

The circumstance that there is no competing tradition as to the place 
of the apostle John's death deserves mention. The tradition that Peter, 
as well as Paul, died at Rome, there being no other tradition as to the 
place of Peter's death, has now gained acceptance. In the case of 

1 Apostolisches Zeitalter (ed. 2), p. 482 seq., p. 538. 

2 Real. Encycl. d. K. u. Theol. (ed. 3), iv. 29, art. ** Christologie." The 
Epistles of Ignatius are " saturated with Johannean ideas and phrases." For 
some examples, see A Biblical Introdtution, by Bennett and Adeney, p. 329, 
n. 4. It is said that Ignatius, writing to the Ephesians, mentions the apostle 
Paul by name (c. xii.), but not the apostle John. The reason is plain. It is in 
connection with his own foresight of martyrdom that he is reminded of Paul; 
John died in old age and in peace. In the preceding chapter (xi,), Ignatius 
speaks of the relation of the Ephesian Christians to "the apostles" in the 
plural. See Lightfoot, App. Fathers^ vol. ii. sect. i. p. 64, vol. i. p. 390. 
Harnack {Chrotiologie, etc., p. 679, n.) considers it probable (iiberwiegend 
wahrscheinlich) that Ignatius has in mind the apostle John when he refers, 
in his Epistle to the Ephesians, to their association with apostles. In this 
Epistle, c. ix., the passage is apparently suggested by John xii. 32. 



262 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

apostles so eminent the absence of rival traditions on this point is of 
weight. 

We are authorized in picturing to ourselves the apostle John, 
near the close of the first century, at Ephesus, a flourishing centre 
of Christianity, surrounded by disciples whom he had trained — 
disciples who, in common with the churches in all that district, 
looked up to him with affectionate reverence. We must bear in 
mind that it is not as author only, conspicuous as that function 
was, that the ecclesiastical tradition concerning John's abode and 
ministry in Asia was connected. Included in this stream of tradi- 
tion which spread far and wide was his instrumentality in organ- 
izing the churches in that region. His influence was operative 
toward restoring a unity in the Christian societies at the time when 
Jerusalem had ceased to be a centre, when Judaism was an im- 
placably hostile force, and the apostle Paul was no more among 
the living. If the apostle John did not write the Gospel which 
bears his name, how did those Asian disciples and churches come 
to believe that he did ? How did all the churches come to share 
in the belief? 

Many of John's disciples must have been living at the time when the 
Gospel is admitted to have been in circulation. If it was not genuine, 
would not voices have been raised to dispute its claims ? If spurious, 
very little scrutiny would have sufficed to detect it. Of late, the micro- 
scopic examination of particular passages in the Fathers, and prolonged 
comment on minor points of evidence about which debate may be 
started, have operated to spread a mist over the more comprehensive 
features of proof. The strength of the external argument for the apos- 
tolic authorship of the Gospel has seldom been fully appreciated by 
believer or sceptic. 

Thus far we have tarried in the domain of external evidence. 
But the twenty-first chapter is evidently an appendix which follows 
the termination of the Gospel in the last verse of the twentieth. 
Yet it contains a testimony obviously from an external source, 
which, however, like the entire chapter which contains it, has 
formed a part of the Gospel since it passed out of the hands of 
the intimate disciples of John. One question is whether this 
closing chapter was a later addition of the author himself, or of 
these, or one of these, near associates. The twenty-third verse, 
which corrects a misinterpretation of words spoken by Jesus to 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 263 

Peter, may not have been written before the death of the author 
of the Gospel, yet the supposition that they were is, perhaps, 
more natural. The occurrence of the words, " the sons of 
Zebedee " (v. 2), since the passage is in a list of apostles who 
were present with Jesus, might naturally enough come from the 
apostle John. The testimony referred to is the twenty-fourth 
verse, " This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things 
and wrote these things, and we know that his witness is true." 
This is said of the Gospel that precedes. It is a declaration 
which means, and can only mean, that " the disciple " — a desig- 
nation, it is admitted by all, of John, the apostle — wrote the fourth 
Gospel. The author of this statement speaks in the name of his 
fellow-disciples, as well as for himself. It is a genuine attestation 
which owed its value to the fact that its authors were known to 
those who read it. 

It behooves us, however, further to inquire whether the force of 
the testimony for the apostolic authorship is weakened by the one 
instance of dissent from the universal behef — the dissent of the so- 
called *'Alogi." This term is a nickname,coined by Hippolytus,or by 
Epiphanius, and is used by him in his descriptive catalogue of here- 
sies, great and small.^ The word might mean "averse to the Logos," 
or it might signify " irrationals." It was invented to stigmatize cer- 
tain opponents of the Johannean authorship of the fourth Gospel 
in Thyatira, somewhere about 150. They had no name, and were 
not numerous enough or important enough to form a sect. They 
were prompted to their denial by their repugnance to the Mon- 
tanist enthusiasts, in particular to what they taught respecting 
prophecy, the incarnate manifestation of the Paraclete, revived 
miraculous gifts of the Spirit, and an earthly millennium soon to be 
ushered in through the second coming of Christ. Their critical 
objections followed in aid of this doctrinal repugnance. So far 
as appears, they did not deny the divinity of Christ. It is not 
even certain that they rejected the Johannean conception of the 
Logos. But they discarded both the Gospel and the Apocalypse. 
From the way in which Irenseus refers to the " Alogi," it is evi- 
dent that he looked upon them as a handful of dissentients whose 
departure from orthodox tenets was in the particulars named 
above.^ The extreme to which they were carried in their hostility 

^ Adv. HcEr.y 51. 2 ^civ. Hcer., iii., xi. 9. 



264 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

to the tenets of the Montanists, who appealed to the promise of 
the Paraclete in the Gospel, naturally engendered an opposition to 
this Gospel. For this position they would be inclined to seek for 
some objective grounds, beyond the doctrinal reason.^ Some of 
them, not improbably, made their way to Rome, or their views may 
have become known there through writings. A lost writing of 
Hippolytus in defence of the Gospel and the Apocalypse is judged 
to have related to them. Be it observed, however, that in the 
widespread reaction of the third century against Chihasm, it was 
not the apostoKc authorship of the Gospel, but of the Apocalypse, 
that was antagonized. It appears that even Caius, an " ecclesias- 
tical person " at Rome, at the end of the second century, did not 
question the apostolic authorship of the Gospel. It was not ques- 
tioned by Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, a half-century later. 
The point of chief concern is, to ascertain what positive explana- 
tion the " Alogi " had to give of the origin of the fourth Gospel. 
They said that it was not worthy to be, or to be recognized, in 
the Church. This implies that, as a matter of fact, it was recog- 
nized and accepted. Following the custom of imputing unaccept- 
able writings, professing to be apostolic, to heretics, they ascribed 
the fourth Gospel to Cerinthus — absurdly, since his opinions 
were the reverse of its teachings. That any disciple of the 
apostle, or any group of his disciples, was its author, they did not 
so much as conjecture. In the mixed system of Cerinthus, the 
world was made by angels, one of whom gave to the Jews their 
law. At the baptism of the man Jesus, Christ descended upon 
him from above, but parted with him prior to his baptism. With 
these ideas was united a millenarian tenet of a materialistic type.^ 
Inasmuch as Cerinthus was known to be a contemporary of the 
apostle John, the notion of the Alogi as to its author is tanta- 
mount to a concurrence with the traditional statement as to its 
date. It shows, moreover, that if they had ever heard of " John 
the Presbyter," it did not so much as occur to them to think of 
him as possibly the author of this Gospel. 

^ On the subject of the Alogi and the importance to be attached to them, 
the discussions of Theodore Zahn and Harnack, who differ widely on this last 
point, are of special value. See Zahn, Gesch. d. Kanons, i. 223-262, ii. 977 ; 
Einl. in d. N. Test., ii. 447, 449, 46 seq. Harnack, Doginengesch., i. (ed. 3), 
p. 660 seq. ; Real-Encycl. d. Theol. u. K., i. p. 386 seq., art. " Aloger " (by Zahn). 

2 For a concise sketch of the opinions of Cerinthus, see Hort, Judaistic 
Christianity, p. 190. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 265 

Zeller, one of the most eminent writers of the school of Baur, can- 
didly remarks that the protest of the Alogi, connected as it was with 
the ascription by them of the Gospel to Cerinthus, does not indicate the 
existence of any other tradition respecting its origin than the tradition 
established in the Church. ^ Irenzeus's notice of the objection made by 
the Alogi to the apostolic authorship of the fourth Gospel makes it 
evident that he regarded their objection as unimportant. Still, had it 
been felt that there was reason for doubt on the question, their asser- 
tion would have been likely to excite a ferment. It should be remem- 
bered that it occurred at a time when there was no accepted canon, no 
commonly recognized collection of New Testament Scriptures. Justin 
refers to the Gospels as being historical authorities, recognized as such 
by the churches. The reaction against the excesses of millenarianism 
provoked even later a repudiation of the Apocalypse, which was not 
confined to an insignificant local opposition. 

A middle theory has been espoused by some, namely, that dis- 
ciples of the apostle John composed the Gospel on the basis of 
oral instruction, which they had received from him. Matthew 
Arnold conjectured that the Ephesian Presbyters, partly on the 
basis of materials furnished by the apostle, were the authors of 
the book.^ Clement of Alexandria reports the tradition that John 
wrote at the urgent request of familiar friends. The Muratorian 
Fragment makes a like statement, with the additional circumstance 
of a revelation to Andrew, to the effect that John " should write 
down everything and all should certify." ^ Weizsacker has advo- 
cated the opinion that the Gospel was written by a disciple of the 
apostle, on the basis of Johannean traditions. There is no pa- 
tristic support for such an hypothesis. It has to confront, first, 
testimony, respecting the authorship of the book, that the 
writer himself gives, which will soon be adverted to ; and, sec- 
ondly, the direct testimony, evidently proceeding from the disci- 
ples of the apostle (John xxi. 24)."* 

1 Theol. Jahrbb., 1845, P- 645" 

2 God and the Bible, p. 248. 

^ Mr. Arnold renders the word recognoscentibus " revise." This is a possi- 
ble, but not the usual, meaning of the word. It signifies " to inspect," " to 
examine" with a view to approval, hence "to indorse" or "authenticate." 
This appears to be its meaning in the document referred to. 

* Harnack {Chronologie, etc., pp. 676, 677) speaks of verse 24 as the offi- 
cious or uncalled-for testimony (unberufenes Zeugniss) attached to the Gos- 
pel. Yet as to its first part, the " bearing witness to these things " by the 
apostle John, he holds that there is a measure of truth in the statement. Yet 



266 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Notice must likewise be taken of the hypothesis of a partition 
of the Gospel between two distinct authors^ the record of the dis- 
courses being ascribed to one, and the record of the historical 
occurrences to another.^ Renan, it will be remembered, gave the 
preference to the narrative part, which, after several modifications 
of opinion, he credited to a disciple of the apostle John, who was 
dependent in a degree for his materials on the apostle himself. 

Wendt, a scholar of an excellent spirit, standing in his theologi- 
cal opinions at an opposite pole from Renan, reverses this allot- 
ment. He assigns to the discourses in the Gospel the same 
relation to the entire book which many critics are disposed to 
ascribe to the Logia in relation to the entire Matthew.^ A consid- 
erable portion of the record of the teaching of Jesus, including 
the principal parts of the final discourses, is thought by Wendt to 
have been written by the apostle, whose sojourn in Asia Minor 
is recognized as a fact. On the basis of this apostolic source, it 
is conceived that a Christian disciple afterward — possibly, but 
not probably, prior to the apostle's death — composed the Gos- 
pel as it now stands. In it the teachings in the apostohc docu- 
ment are modified and enlarged to accord with the shape which 
the tradition had assumed in the circle of Asia Minor Christians, 
and the unwritten tradition of the narrative matter is added in the 
form which it had acquired among them. Various changes and 
supplements, it is said, belong to what is termed " second evan- 
gelic tradition," traces of which, it is argued, are discernible in 
the first and third Gospels, as contrasted with Mark. 

Wendt believes that the Evangelist is correct as to some prominent 
controverted points, such as the self-designation (but within narrow 
limits) of the apostolic author, the longer duration of the ministry of 
Jesus, the journeys repeatedly {manchmals) made by him to Jerusalem, 

this entire verse has been a part of the Gospel as far back as anything is 
known of it. It is in truth a "Zeugniss" — a testimony. The clause 
"wrote these things" is a part of it. It is agreed that it refers to John the 
apostle. It comes from those whose testimony could only commend itself to 
acceptance by being known to emanate from persons who had stood in con- 
nection with the apostle. 

1 The different forms of the partition-theory are sketched in Mangold- 
Bleek, Einl. in d. N. T., p. 185 seq., up to the date of this work (1875). 

2 Wendt's exposition of his views is given in his Die Lehre Jesu (1886- 
1890). He has presented a clear and compact restatement in Das Johannes- 
evangelium, Eine Untersuchung, etc. (1900). 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 267 

his prolonged Judean teaching, the date of the crucifixion, and (not im- 
probably) the association of the first disciples, including John, with John 
the Baptist, and their acquaintance thus made with Jesus. But we are 
told that in the completed Gospel there is no small admixture of unhis- 
torical circumstances, as well as of doctrinal matter, which are additions 
of the Evangelist. As a whole, we have a history the authentic por- 
tions of which must be dissected out of it by the skilful manipulation 
of the critic. The prologue is cited as one instance in which proof of 
interpolation can be discerned. Certain sentences which are alleged to 
be Philonian ideas of the Logos, are said to be insertions in the apos- 
tolic source, which said nothing of the personal preexistence of the 
Logos or of the agency of the Logos in the work of creation. 

It is natural to ask where the narrative parts which the other 
Gospels do not contain, and which, it is contended, are in con- 
flict with them, come from. The same question occurs respecting 
the portion of teaching which, it is maintained, is not consistent 
with contents of the authentic document from the apostle's own 
hand. 

Wendt absolutely acquits the Evangelist of any intention to 
deceive. The Gospel is no product of a doctrinal party or bias. 
It is not 2. freie Dichhmg — a product of the imagination.^ The 
Evangelist may himself have been a hearer of the apostle John. 
At any rate, he worked on oral communications from the apostle.^ 
The latter had lived for many years in the circle of Asia Minor 
Christians.^ The special interest felt in John at Ephesus is mani- 
fest. The Evangehst belonged to the circle in which John had 
lived.* " With what reverent interest (^pietlitvollei7t Interesse) they 
may have received there the notes in which the apostle had set 
down his recollections of the conversation, fraught with interest, 
and the discourses of Jesus." ^ Yet a different set of conceptions, 
doctrinal and historical, had sprung up, independently of the apos- 
tles, in that Christian community, when the Evangelist wrote — 
which Wendt thinks was probably in the first quarter of the 
second century — that community where the apostle was so re- 
vered and his teachings, oral and written — in great part written 
— were so prized and cherished.^ Somehow, without suspecting 
it, his disciples had lost an important part of their real import. 
Unconsciously and artlessly {iinbefangen) they had carried their 
own ideas over into the words of the apostle ! The hypothesis of 

^ Das JohannesevangeL, pp. 227-228. ^ pp. 222, 223. ^ p 219. 

*p. 217. ^ Ibid. 6p, 218. 



268 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Wendt comprises in it inconsistent conjectures. These are sup- 
ported by details of criticism, sometimes plausible, always sincere, 
but usually suggested by supposed difficulties which admit of fair 
solutions not implying the theory which the author favors.^ 

It is for competent judges to decide whether the acceptance of 
this and every other partition theory is not precluded by the iden- 
tity of style, both in expression and thought, between the Gospel 
and the First Epistle. As to the Gospel, Neander's remark that 
it was produced ^^ aus einem Gusse^^ — at one cast — stands as 
the judgment of a scholar of acute perception and of deep spiritual 
insight. What Strauss said of the Gospel, that it is a " seamless 
garment," is the verdict of a proficient in the literary art who, so 
far as this verdict is concerned, could not have been swayed by 
prejudice. The partition theory would make it criss-crossed with 
seams. In following the suggested lines of demarcation, we soon 
become conscious that we are walking on slippery ground. Cer- 
tainly the same sort of procedure might be made to appear equally, 
and even more, plausible, if applied to numerous other productions 
in history and in other branches of literature, the unity of which 
nobody questions. In a portion of Wendt's list of instances of a 
"broken connection" in the records of the discourses of Christ, 
a break is not recognized even by such opponents of the apostolic 
authorship of the Gospel as Jiilicher and Smiedel. In certain pas- 
sages Haupt, who dissents in general from the positions of Wendt, 
is disposed to agree with him as to the phenomena. His explana- 
tion, however, is wholly different, and is deserving of more atten- 
tion than it has received. It is that the apostle, in setting forth 
the objections from the side of the Jews, and their refutation by 
Jesus, has occasionally taken the same course as that taken by 
Matthew — for example, in the case of the Sermon on the Mount. 
That is to say, with the statement of what was said at a particular 
time or place, the apostle has now and then connected sayings 
uttered by them or by him on the same topic, but on other occa- 
sions. There is no need of bringing in another writer than the 

1 A very able review of Wendt's hypothesis by Haupt, in the Studien u. 
Kritiken (1893, Heft 2), discusses adversely his arguments, especially the 
exegetical passages in support of his position. A good example of Haupt's 
comments is his answer to Wendt's interpretation of the terms a-rj/xeia and epya 
in the fourth Gospel, and to the inferences drawn from them. (Haupt, 
p. 238 seg.) 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 269 

apostle, — a solution which is improbable. If it were another 
writer, he would naturally locate his addition elsewhere, instead of 
piecing out the words of Jesus by an invented supplement. In 
order to hold the non-apostolic Evangehst responsible for " dislo- 
cations," it is suggested by Wendt that he was dealing with the 
apostolic source from memory, not having it in his hand — a sup- 
position, of course, unsupported by proof.^ 

Wendt recognizes the evidence of the influence of the apostle John's 
teaching on Ignatius and on Justin. He thinks it remarkable, however, 
that their allusions should be to passages which belong in the apostolic 
source rather than in the narrative portion of the Gospel. But here is 
the passage in Justin {Dial. 88) : " I am the voice of one crying in the 
wilderness," etc. (John i. 20, 21, 27). The reference of this quotation 
to some other source than the fourth Gospel would strike one, in a less 
sincere writer, as a makeshift. The reasonable presumption is, that it is 
taken from the narrative in John. Considering the aims of Ignatius, 
and his themes, we see that he would naturally refer to teachings in the 
Gospel rather than incidents. The same is true of Justin. The fact 
that Tatian, the pupil of Justin, in his Diatesseron, combined the 
fourth Gospel with the other three, thereby implying that it was held to 
be equal in authority, makes it most unlikely that Justin was not 
acquainted with it or was of a different mind. 

The partition theories are excluded by the definite and emphatic 
testimony at the end of the Gospel. To the Gospel as a whole 
this testimony refers when it says that the author " wTote these 
things." This is not questioned by Wendt. His explanation is, 
that as the Logia of Matthew at the basis of the first Gospel caused 
his name to be attached to the entire book, so it was with the 
apostolic source in relation to the fourth Gospel. The cases are 
not parallel. For one thing, there is no definite assertion of this 
sort at the end of the first Gospel. In the case before us, we have 
an expHcit declaration which has been a part of the Gospel since 
its first promulgation. 

It comes from the circle of John's disciples, as is shown in 
the plural: "We know that his witness is true." In the closing 
verse, which is apparently from the same writer, he resumes the first 
person : " I suppose that the world would not contain," etc., — an 
expression of the wonder and enthusiasm which the fulness of mate- 
rial contained in the life and works of Jesus awakened in his mind. 

1 See Appendix, Note 15. 



2/0 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

It is conceivable that the external evidence, cogent as it 
appears, for the genuineness of the fourth Gospel should be out- 
weighed by internal proofs of an opposite tenor. This branch of 
the discussion we have now to consider. 

Under this head the first fact to be mentioned is that the 
author of the Gospel was a Hebrew, not one of foreign birth, but 
a Palestinian. This is evident from the linguistic character of the 
book. It is altogether pecuhar. The Greek was not the writer's 
vernacular ; it was an acquired tongue. This has been clearly illus- 
trated by Lightfoot,^ and has been elucidated by Ewald,^ who says : 

" It is quite worthy of notice that the Greek language of the author 
carries in it the clearest and strongest marks of a genuine Hebrew who 
was born in the Holy Land, and in that society grew up without speak- 
ing Greek, and who even in the midst of the Greek garb which he 
learned to wrap about him, still keeps the whole spirit and breadth of 
his mother-tongue, and has no scruples in letting himself be guided by 
it. The Greek language of our Gospel, to be sure, has not so strong a 
Hebrew color as that of the older Gospels ; it has taken up more genu- 
ine Greek traits. But in its real spirit and tone no style could be more 
genuinely Hebrew than our author's. Since, nevertheless, even in his 
linguistic peculiarity, he has not cast aside his characteristically creative 
power and movement, there has originated with him a Greek which is 
peculiar, and has nothing like it elsewhere even among writings which 
are tinged with the Hebrew. Only the time, the biographical facts, and 
all the characteristics of the apostle John can explain the originality of 
this Greek style." 

The impression made on the ordinary reader by the sceptical 
criticism on this subject of the nativity of the author is a good 
deal due to the frequent use of the Greek word " Logos " instead 
of " Word," its proper rendering. Enough has been said as to 
the strong Hebraic coloring of the author's style. The concep- 
tions that often recur in the Gospel, as " hfe," "light," "truth," 
are drawn from the circle of Old Testament thought. The author- 
ity of the Old Testament, the inspiration of Moses and the Proph- 
ets, are assumed.^ With the characteristic features of the Messianic 

1 Lecture on the " Internal Evidence for the Johannine Authorship," in 
The Expositor, for January, February, and March, 1890. Also, with full 
details, Biblical Essays, pp. 16, 126. 

2 Ewald, Die Johannischen Schriften, vol. i. pp. 44 seq. Ewald on this 
point is an authority of the first rank. 

3 i. 45, iii. 14, V. 46, vi. 32, vii. 38, viii. 56, x. 35, xii. 14 seq., 37 seq., xv. 25, 
xix. 23 seq., 28, 35, 36, 37, XX. 31. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 27 1 

expectation the author is quite familiar. The same is true of 
Jewish opinions and customs generally ; for example, the usages 
connected with marriage and with the burial of the dead. Wit- 
ness his acquaintance with the prejudice against conversing with 
women (iv. 27), with the mutual hatred of Jews and Samaritans 
(iv. 9), with the opinion that deformity or suffering implies sin (ix. 
2). He is intimately conversant with Jewish observances, as is 
seen in what he says of "the last day of the feast" (vii. 37) — 
that is, the day added to the original seven — of the wedding at 
Cana, of the burial of Lazarus. We have seen that the allusions 
to the topography of the Holy Land come from one personally 
conversant with the places. He knows how to distinguish Cana 
of Galilee from another place, of more consequence, of the same 
name (ii. i, 11). Of the Sea of Galilee, the passage across, and the 
paths on its shores, he has an accurate recollection. The same 
is seen at the opening of ch. iv., in the reference to the Valley of 
Sychem. He has in his mind the image of the Pavement, or plat- 
form on which Pilate's chair was placed, with its Hebrew name, 
Gabbatha (xix. 13). 

It is agreed on all sides that the Gospel stands in a special and 
peculiar relation to one apostle.^ That apostle is admitted, with 
no dissent that merits attention, to be the apostle John.^ But the 
name of the apostle who is thus prominent is not mentioned. 

The mention of it is purposely avoided, a circumlocution standing in 
the room of it. At the Last Supper, there reclined on the bosom of 
Jesus "one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved" (xiii. 23). To him, 
designated in the same terms, Jesus commits the care of his mother 
(xiv. 26). This disciple — "the other disciple whom Jesus loved" 
(xx. 2) — goes with Peter to the tomb of Jesus. Once more (xxi. 7) 
he is designated in the same way. He it is who is termed " another 
disciple," and " that other disciple" (xviii. 15, 16; compare xx. 2, 3, 
4, 8). Unquestionably he is the "one of the two" whose name is not 
given, the associate of Andrew (i. 40). In the appendix to the Gospel 
(xxi. 24; compare vs. 20), he is explicitly declared to be its writer.^ 
That he was one of those who had personally known Jesus is left to be 
inferred, yet it imist be inferred from his use of the first person plural 

1 See, e.g., Weizsacker, Das Apostolisches Zeitalter, 2d ed. p. 513. 

2 Ibid., pp. 513 seq. 

^ The passage will bear no other interpretation. Weizsacker says (^Das 
Apostol. Zeitalt., p. 535) that it need not be taken literally, but as simply 
meaning that the apostle was the ultimate source. This will not do. 



2/2 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

of the pronoun. In the Prologue (i. 14), it is said, "We beheld his 
glory,'' etc. This cannot be understood to denote simply a spiritual, 
mystic vision. It is of the incarnate Christ, Christ in the flesh, that 
the writer is speaking. In the First Epistle the language is : '' That 
which we beheld and our hands handled." If this does mean literal 
sense-perception, verified by touch as well as by sight, how could the 
author express such a fact if he wanted to ? ^ The author of both writ- 
ings is one and the same. Which of the disciples is meant in all these 
passages? Not Peter, since Peter is not only mentioned by name in 
various places but is also expressly distinguished from him. It was an 
apostle not lower in rank than Peter. It w^as not James ; James was put 
to death early in the apostolic age (Acts xii. 2 seq.'). Beyond doubt the 
apostle whose name is suppressed is John. Why is he referred to in 
this indirect way? If the author was recording events in which he him- 
self had a prominent part, he might prefer to present the narrative in 
this objective way. Like examples in literature are not wanting. That 
he had to bring out his close intimacy with Jesus might be another 
motive for this reserve. ^ It is worthy of remark that not even the name 
of his brother James is to be found in the Gospel. These motives it 
ought not to be difficult to comprehend. One appeal in the Gospel to 
ocular testimony calls for special notice. After stating that one of the 
soldiers pierced the side of Jesus and that there came out blood and 
water, the Evangelist says (xix. 35, Revised Version) : "And he that 
hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true ; and he knoweth 
that he saith true, that ye also may believe." Does the Evangelist make 
an appeal to another witness separate from himself, who is said to be 
conscious of the truth of his own testimony ; or does he appeal " to his 
own actual experience, now solemnly recorded for the instiTiction of his 
readers?" The question is thus clearly put by Westcott, who deals 
with it in a very intelligent and convincing manner : ^ " The last alter- 
native has generally been accepted, and on good grounds, that is, the 
Evangelist speaks of himself in the third person. There are examples 
of this usage in classical writers. In John ix. 37, there is a like in- 
stance. Jesus says, ' Thou hast both seen him, and he it is that speak- 
eth with thee.' If the author of the Gospel could use the first clause 
... of himself, there can be no reasonable doubt that he could also 
use of himself the particular pronoun which occurs in the second clause.'' 
" To resume and emphasize the reference," the author elsewhere uses 

^ Futile attempts to avoid this interpretation are answered by B. Weiss, 
Die drei Briefe d. Apostels Johannes, ad loc. Parallel statements of sense- 
perception, in the Gospel, are i. 32, 38, iv. 35, vi. 5, xi. 45. The difficulty of 
attaching any other meaning to these two passages (John i. 14 and i Ep. 
John i. i) is recognized by McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 616. 

2 See another suggestion on the phrase " whom Jesus loved," Appendix, 
Note 16. ^ St. John'' s Gospel^ Introd., p. 26. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 273 

this particular pronoun (ch. i. 18 ; ch. v. 38). A few verses before the 
record of this act of the soldier (vv. 26, 27), "the Evangelist is pre- 
sented as a historical figure in the scene." When, recalling the scene, 
he comes to this incident in which he was deeply interested, it is quite 
natural that he should pause and " separate himself as the witness from 
his immediate position as a writer. In this mental attitude, he looks from 
without upon himself (cKai/os) as affected at that memorable moment 
by the fact which he records, in order that it may now create in others 
the faith (TncrTcvrp-e) which it had created in his own soul." Moreover, 
it was not a witness that was given at one time ; the tense is the perfect 
("it has been given") ; and, further, it continues to be given ("he 
knoweth that he saith true"). It is given "that ye may believe." 
The other interpretation, as Westcott remarks, is pointless. It would 
make the passage nothing but an emphatic appeal to an unknown wit- 
ness who is said to be conscious of the truthfulness of his own testi- 
mony. If the passage had stood, //<? ///«/ /la^/i seen hath borne witness, 
that ye also may believe, nobody would have doubted that the reference 
of the writer was to himself; but the intercalated clauses do not inter- 
fere in the least with this interpretation. The language chosen by the 
Evangelist grows out of his sense of the solemnity of the attestation 
which he is giving.^ 

That the author of the Gospel signifies to his readers that he 
is giving his personal testimony appears evident from the passages 
adduced above. The truth of this profession is confirmed by the 
appended attestation from another hand (John xxi. 24).^ If it 

1 " . . . um mit besonderer Fierlichkeit die Wahrhaftigkeit seines Zeugnisses 
zu versichern." (Weiss-Meyer, ad loc.') See also Weiss, Einl. in d. N. 7\, 
p. 560. 

Zahn thinks that " he " (^iKetvos) that " knoweth " is Christ. He refers to 
certain passages as illustrative (John ix. 37 ; i. 34, especially i John ii. 6, 
iii. 5, 7, 16). See Zahn, Einl. in d. N. T.^ vol. ii. pp. 172 seq. But the inter- 
pretation given above is better fitted to the language and is quite satisfactory. 

Baur regards the Evangelist as speaking of himself as the witness. But he 
would construe this alleged perception of spiritual objects as a kind of mysti- 
cal, spiritual discernment, — an intuition of spiritual effects to follow the 
death of Christ. This is to confound plain prose with poesy. The solemn 
tone of the assertion does not cohere with such a view of it. If the Evangel- 
ist did not see what he emphatically avers that he did see, his misstatement 
must have a worse source than what the critic calls " die Macht der Idee." 

^ It is certainly surprising, as all must confess, that there is no mention of 
Zebedee and his sons, except in a row of names of apostles in the appendix 
(xxi. I, 2). Whether this appended chapter as far as the 24th verse was from 
the pen of the apostle or from disciples of the apostle (or one of them) by 
whom the Gospel was sent forth, is still an open question. It is not easy to 
T 



2/4 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

be not the apostle who writes the Gospel, it is not easy to escape 
the inference that deceit is intended. If so, it is a different sort 
of deceit from that which characterizes the pseudonymous writ- 
ings with which we are acquainted. There is none of that naivete 
of the authors of this species of literature, which constitutes 
the sole apology that can be made for them. They do not set a 
trap for the reader. They do not in a sly way entice him to 
connect the book with its pretended author. They betray, as 
they feel, no hesitation in assuming his name. Gn the contrary, 
if the apostle John was not the author, it is difficult to escape the 
conviction that an artful device is carried from the beginning to 
the end of the book. The writer not only pretends to be the 
apostle, but in order to succeed in this aim affects modesty. He 
puts himself side by side with Peter, leans on the breast of Jesus, 
goes to his sepulchre, stands before the cross, there to have the 
mother of the Lord committed to his charge, but, in order to 
mislead his readers more effectually, takes pains to avoid writing 
the name of John, — except when he speaks of the Baptist — 
whose usual title, however, he suppresses, — doing thus from cun- 
ning what John the apostle, being of the same name and a disciple 
of the Baptist, might do naturally. 

Then the Gospel is virtually an autobiography. — It professes 
to tell the story of the origin and development of the author's 
personal faith in Jesus as the divine Son of God. It is the grounds 
of his own faith which he wishes to set forth, his purpose being 
to inspire others with the same faith, or to confirm them in it. 
After a short preface, a glowing avowal of the faith which had 
brought joy to his soul, he enters upon the story of its genesis and 
growth. Why not recount the very facts which were really the 
source of this faith in his heart? Why betake himself to fables? 
Did he imagine that the words and works of Christ, which had 

decide. If the latter alternative is adopted, it is not difficult, since the dis- 
ciple had the Gospel in his hand, to account for his falling into a similar style, 
and for his keeping up the designation of John as " the disciple whom Jesus 
loved," etc., instead of speaking of him by name. But this question of the 
authorship of the first twenty-three verses is one on which critics of all 
schools are pretty evenly divided. There appears to be no good reason for 
attril)uting the closing (twenty-fifth) verse to still another disciple. In the 
twenty-fourth he speaks for the group of John's disciples — ^^zve know," etc. ; 
in the twenty-fifth he expresses an individual feeling. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 2/5 

actually evoked faith in his own soul, required to be reenforced by 
fiction?^ 

The fact of the personal love of the author of the Gospel to 
Jesus appears irreconcilable with the supposition that the narra- 
tive is non-apostolic. It is evident that the author regards Jesus 
with a warm personal affection. Whom does he love ? Is it an 
unreal person, the offspring of philosophical speculation? The 
person whom he loves is the historic Jesus. Of him he says, 
*' which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, 
and our hands have handled." ^ He is conscious that he had been 
specially an object of the love of Jesus, — " the disciple whom 
Jesus loved." To Jesus he is consciously united by the closest 
tie of personal friendship. Did the author picture to himself a 
character, and then, conceiving of him as an actual person who 
had said and done what imagination had attributed to him, concen- 
trate on this ideal creation the heart's deepest love? 

Does not the tender simplicity which marks so many passages 
of the narrative stamp them with the seal of truth ? The record 
of the tears of Jesus on witnessing the sorrow of Mary and her 
friends ; the saying that, as death approached, having loved 
his disciples, " he loved them to the end " ; the pathetic words 
"Behold thy mother," "Behold thy son," which were spoken 
from the cross — is not the verity of these accounts evident of 
itself ? 

It has frequently been urged that the catholic tone of the 
author, and, in particular, his method of speaking of " the Jews " 
as of an alien body, are not consistent with the character and 
position of the apostle John. We must bear in mind, how- 
ever, that John is never represented in the apostolic history as a 
Judaizer. He gave the right hand of fellowship to the aposde to 
the Gentiles (Gal. ii. 9), and in the Jerusalem conference (Acts 
XV.) he stands in the background. He is not writing at that 
earlier time when the Jewish Christians were keeping up the 
observances of the temple, and hoping for a vast influx of con- 
verts from their countrymen. The temple lay in ruins. The full 
meaning of the Master, when he said, " In this place is one greater 

1 See Lecture of Dr. T. Dwight, in Bos/on Lectures (1871). 

2 I John i. I. The identity of authorship between the Epistle and the 
Gospel, as we have said, is established not only by the tradition but by con- 
vincing internal evidence. 



2/6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

than the temple" (Matt. xii. 6), had been opened to his disciples 
by the startling lessons of Providence and by the teaching of the 
Spirit. The rejection of Jesus the Messiah by the mass of the 
Jews, which long before had so deeply afflicted the apostle Paul, 
was now a palpable fact. The bitter antipathy of the Jews to the 
Church had broken out, as the Jewish war approached, in acts of 
violence. At an earlier time persecution of the Jewish Christians 
by the Jews is referred to by Paul (i Thess. ii. 14), and in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews (x. 32-35). In the year 44, Herod 
Agrippa I., a rigid Jew, had seized and killed John's own brother, 
James. About a score of years later — Hegesippus places the 
event just before the siege of Jerusalem by Vespasian — even 
James the Just, the brother of Jesus, who had been least of all 
obnoxious to Jewish zealots, was stoned to death by the fanatical 
populace and their leaders. It is probable that it was on the eve 
of the breaking out of the war with the Romans, that not only 
John, but a company of disciples, including in their number one or 
more of the other apostles, went to Asia. There, in the midst of 
the Gentile churches, at Ephesus where Paul had previously 
labored, the apostle John survived for many years. He must 
have been in truth a dull spectator not to have discovered the 
meaning of the events which made the significance of Christianity 
and its real relation to the Old Testament religion and people as 
clear as noonday. His must have been an obtuse mind indeed, 
if, even independently of special enlightenment from above, what 
Jesus had said respecting the spiritual and catholic nature of 
true religion and of his kingdom had not been brought vividly 
home to his recollection, and its import opened to his vision in 
the light of the catastrophe which had demolished the Jewish 
sanctuary and state, and of the implacable hostility which had 
driven him and his fellow-disciples as outcasts into the bosom of 
the churches that Paul had planted among the heathen. 

What is the attitude of this Gospel toward the religion and the 
people of the old covenant? Is mention made of "the Jews"? The 
same phrase is on the lips of Paul, ^ whose ardent love to his country- 
men made him willing himself, were it possible, to perish for them. 
The author of the fourth Gospel is a reverent believer in Moses and 
the prophets (i. 47, iv. 22, x. 35). It is from his report that we are 
informed of the pregnant words of Jesus, " Salvation is of the Jews " 

1 Gal. i. 13, 14 : " the Jews' religion." 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 277 

(iv. 22). Jesus is represented as having come to "his own"" (i. 11). 
The Jews were " his own " in a peculiar sense. Their refusal to receive 
him is to the author's mind in the highest degree pathetic. If the 
ecclesiastical tradition respecting the date of the Gospel and the place 
and circumstances of its composition is not discarded, there is nothing 
in the tone of the author to hinder us from believing that he was John 
the apostle. 

If the apostolic authorship of the fourth Gospel is to be dis- 
proved, it must be on the ground of countervailing evidence to be 
gathered from other New Testament documents. 

It has been insisted that the same author could not have written 
both the Apocalypse and the Gospel. This is an objection which 
merits candid attention. It is true that the differences in style, 
and in the style of thought, between these two books are such 
that both could hardly have been composed at the same time, 
certainly not in the same mood of feeling. But if we suppose 
altered circumstances and an interval of time, the case is different. 
That an 'author who, under the passionate emotions roused in him 
by the outburst of Jewish and heathen persecutions, in the mood 
of prophetic exaltation, had written the Revelation, should com- 
pose, twenty or thirty years later, works like the Gospel and 
the First Epistle, is not impossible. The cruelty of Nero may have 
stirred up unrecorded outbreakings of persecution elsewhere. The 
Tubingen critics erroneously attributed to the Apocalypse a judaizing 
and anti-Pauline spirit. But the same critics themselves pointed out 
marked affinities between the Gospel and the Apocalypse. Baur 
even styled the Gospel a spiritualized (vergeistigte) Apocalypse. 
In truth, in the book of Revelation there are no traces of Jewish 
exclusiveness. A more careful exegesis disproves the imputation 
of such a spirit. ^ It is remarkable that in the Revelation Christ is 
called "the Word [Logos] of God" (Rev. xix. 13). Certainly 
weight is to be attached to the statement of Irenaeus that the 
Apocalypse appeared " in the end of Domitian's reign " ; ^ yet he 
does not, as regards the question of the date, refer, as he does 
concerning the authorship of the Gospel, to personal testimonies. 
For the earlier date, the age of Nero, there are not wanting strong 
internal proofs.^ By not a few writers who favor the later date for 
the book in its present form, but regard it as a composite work, 

1 On this topic, see Hoxt, Judaisiic Christianity, p. 190. 

2 Adv. Hccr.y V, 30, 3. 8 See Rev. xi, i seq., xvii. 9-I I. 



2/8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the force of this evidence and the earher date of important 
portions, or of the nucleus, of it are admitted.^ 

The many instances of a mistaken rejection, on internal grounds, 
of the tradition of authorship in the case of literary works cer- 
tainly afford a needed lesson of caution to critics. One striking 
instance may be adduced as an example. Dr. Edward Zeller, 
a son-in-law of Baur, was one of the ablest expositors and de- 
fenders of his theological positions, including the "entweder — 
oder," or the dilemma which was insisted on, that either the Apoc- 
alypse or the Gospel, one or the other, is not the production of 
the apostle John. Zeller, in his earlier work on Greek philosophy, 
the Platonische Studieii, maintained that " Leges" is not a genuine 
writing of Plato. This he did on the basis of both style and con- 
tents, and on very plausible grounds, notwithstanding that its 
genuineness is attested by Aristotle.^ But Zeller, in his able work. 
Die Philosophie d. Griechen^ retreats from this positive opinion. 
He suggests that if it could be believed that the " Leges " were a 
work of Plato, unfinished by him, but worked over and filled out 
by a pupil, the difficulty would be lessened — a conception, by the 
way, very like one of the hypotheses respecting the fourth Gospel. 
But the difficulty, he still feels, would not be removed. In the 
later edition, however, of the same work, Zeller, finding the testi- 
mony of Aristotle and other considerations of too great weight, 
retracts altogether his earlier contention, and accepts the " Laws " 

1 See Harnack, Chronologic, etc., vol. i. p. 245 ; Briggs, The Messiah of the 
Apostles, ch. ix. p. 303. Dr. Briggs ascribes to the apostle John " the apocalypse 
of the epistles of the seven churches and all matter related thereto." "On this 
view," says Professor Stevens {i.e. the vievi^ that the book is the growth of 
successive contributions), "the apostle might well have compiled and pub- 
lished one or more editions of it." " By this theory the phenomena which 
favor an earlier, and those which favor a later, date could be accounted for 
as well as the apparent combination of Jewish and Christian elements" {The 
Theology of the New Testament, pp. 526, 527). Professor F. C. Porter, in the 

learned article, " Revelation, Book of, " in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, 
favors the later date for the book in its present compass. 

Professor Ramsay, who is of the same opinion, comparing the Apocalypse 
with the Gospel and First Epistle of John, judges that " there is a closer rela- 
tion between the three works than exists between them and any fourth 
work" {The Church in the Roman Empire, p. 303). 

2 Some of the characteristics of the "Laws," in contrast with those of the 
other Dialogues, are described in Jowett's translation of Plato, vol. iv., Intro- 
duction. 3 -ph. I. § 24. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 279 

as the genuine production of Plato in his later life. Panaetius, a 
noted Stoic philosopher at Athens, went so far as to reject the 
Phaedon as not being the work of Plato. He admired Plato, 
but disbelieving in the immortality of the soul, he thought that the 
main proposition and the arguments of this Dialogue are un- 
worthy of the philosopher to whom it is ascribed. Then, as Grote 
observes, he was probably influenced by a singularity in the Phae- 
don — it being the only dialogue in which the author mentions 
himself in the third person,^ — a point, it may be remarked, in 
which the Phaedon resembles the fourth Gospel. As to the rejec- 
tion of the " Laws," on internal grounds, Grote says : " There are 
few dialogues in the list against which stronger objections on inter- 
nal grounds can be brought than against Leges and Menexenus. Yet 
both of them stand authenticated, beyond all reasonable dispute, as 
genuine works of Plato, not merely by the canon of Thrasyllus, 
but also by the testimony of Aristotle." ^ Grote adds that consid- 
ering Plato's long period of philosophic composition and our 
limited knowledge of the circumstances of his life, " it is surely 
hazardous to limit the range of his varieties, on the faith of a 
critical repugnance not merely subjective and faUible, but withal 
of entirely modern growth." ^ 

How many readers with no knowledge of the author save what 
the style of the books permit would say that Carlyle's Life of 
Schiller (1823-24) and translation of Wilhelm Meister (1824) 
could be from the same pen as Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and 
Life of Frederick (1858-65) ? 

We have now to test the character of the fourth Gospel by a 
more detailed scrutiny of its contents. We have seen that accord- 
ing to this theory, of which Baur was the most eminent sponsor, 
this Gospel was the development of a theological idea, fervently 
cherished by the unknown author, yet appropriated by him from 
Alexandrian sources and interwoven by him both with imaginary 
teachings of Jesus and with allegorical facts likewise imaginary. 

The first question is whether the narrative portions of the Gospel 
furnish a proof for this theory. Not to dwell on the strain which 
is required in so many instances to match the allegory to the 
narrative, the theory is confuted by the abundant evidences of a 
distinct historical feeling and point of view on the part of the 

1 Grote's Plato, i. 158. 2 Jbid.^ p. 209. * Ibid.^ p. 201. 



28o THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

writer. No critic has shown this more effectively than Renan, 
despite his a priori increduhty in respect to everything that par- 
takes of the miraculous.^ 

Before citing some of his observations, certain of the indirect indica- 
tions that the Evangelist speaks from personal recollection may be 
pointed out. "And it was at Jerusalem at the feast of the dedication, 
and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's 
porch " (x. 22, 23). Why should it be mentioned that Jesus was in this 
porch? Nothing in the context called for it. How account for its 
being mentioned except on the supposition that the scene was pictured 
in the author's memory? Stating this fact, he must needs explain to 
heathen readers why Jesus walked in this sheltered place : " it was 
winter." The festival occurred in December. When Mary anointed 
the feet of Jesus, "the house was filled with the odor of the ointment" 
(xii. 3) .2 A similar personal reminiscence is in John viii. 20. The 
brazen chests constituting the " treasury " the author had seen. The 
image of Jesus as he stood near them was stamped on his memory. Why 
should he refer to " ^non," where John was baptizing, as being " near 
to Salim " (iii. 23) ? Why should he describe the pool at Jerusalem 
as being by the sheep-gate, as called in the Hebrew " Bethesda," and as 
having five porches (v. 2)? Why give the number of porches? 
Chronological statements, some of them defining not only the day but 
the hour, are frequent. They come in, not as if they had been picked 
up to be wrought in, but as a spontaneous reminiscence. " It was about 
the tenth hour " (i. 39) : " For John was not yet cast into prison " 
(iii. 24) — these are examples. For what reason is Philip designated 
(xii. 21) as "of Bethsaida of Galilee," when the connected incident 
does not call for any such local specification? What reason is there 
for adding to the statement that Pilate sat down in his judgment-seat 
the remark that the place " is called the Pavement, but in the Hebrew, 
Gabbatha " ? What can this be but an instance of local description, natu- 
ral in referring to a spot where a man has witnessed a memorable event? 
What reason for the mention of the visit of Jesus to Capernaum (John 
ii. 11), save as a personal reminiscence? ^ 

Renan is often struck with marks of historical verity in the Gospel. 

"Whence come particulars, so exact, upon Philip, upon the country 
of Andrew and Peter, and especially about Nathanael ? Nathanael 

1 Vie de Jesus, 13th ed. Appendice. 

2 In the account of a landing of certain passengers from the Mayflower before 
the whole company disembarked at PlymxOuth, it is said that while on the land 
they filled their boat with juniper. The writer says of the juniper, it "smelled 
very sweet and strong" and " we burnt the most part of it while we lay there " 
— a feature in the description which shows of itself that he was one of them. 

^ See Appendix, Note 17, p. 412, 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 28 1 

belongs to this Gospel alone. I cannot regard traits so precise which 
pertain to him, as inventions originating a hundred years after the time 
of Jesus and far away from Palestine. If he is a symbolic personage, 
why does the writer take the trouble to inform us that he is of Cana 
of Galilee, a city which the Evangelist appears to be particularly well 
acquainted with?'' "Why should our Evangelist speak repeatedly 
of Cana of Galilee, a small city, extremely obscure? Why should he 
want to create, too late, a celebrity for this little borough, which 
certainly semi-Gnostic Christians of Asia Minor had no motive for 
remembering? " 

The whole passage fronn ch. i. to ch. iv. 2 appears to Renan to 
be stamped with tokens of historical truth. He mentions specially 
the topographical references. Of ch. iv. 3-6, he does not hesi- 
tate to say that " none but a Jew of Palestine who had often passed 
to the entrance of the Valley of Sychem could have written this." 

"The verses vii. i-io are a little historical treasure. ... It is 
here that the symbolic and dogmatic explanation is completely at fault. 
. . . After this, how can it be said that the personages of the fourth 
Gospel are types, invented characters, and not living beings in flesh 
and blood?'' 

Renan adds — so impressed is he with the verisimilitude of this 
account — that the fourth Gospel is above the Synoptics " in the 
evidences afforded of a history and narrative which aim to be exact." 
Notwithstanding his ingrained disbelief in miracles, he finds unmis- 
takable marks of truth in the Johannean narrative of the relations 
of Jesus to the sisters of Bethany. Despite the record of the rais- 
ing of Lazarus, Renan perceives in the entire closing portion of the 
fourth Gospel, the whole story of the betrayal and passion included, 
particular marks of accuracy which are superior to such as are 
found in the Synoptics. The omission by the Synoptics of a notice 
of the miracle of the raising of Lazarus is incidental to the passing 
over by them of the interval between the Galilean labors of Jesus 
and the last festival which he attended at Jerusalem.^ 

Could it be shown that the various parts of the Gospel nar- 
rative are artificial, or plainly improbable, its genuineness might 
be disproved. But interpretations of Baur and of others who 
agree with him on the main question, by which this is sought to 
be done, are too often forced upon the text. 

1 "The silence of the Synoptics in regard to the episode at Bethany does 
not make much of an impression on me. The Synoptics had a very poor 
knowledge of all that immediately preceded the last week of Jesus. It is not 



282 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

What, for example, can be more groundless than the opinion of 
many critics, from Baur to Keim, that, according to this Gospel, Jesus 
was not baptized? It is strange that any reader, with John i. 32, 33 
before him, could ever impute to the Evangelist such an intent. How, 
it might be added, could the author, whoever he was, expect to destroy 
the estabhshed belief of Christians in a fact like this, embedded as it 
was in the Gospel tradition ? If he were rash enough to set about such 
a task, how could he hope to succeed by merely omitting to make an 
explicit record of the circumstance ? It was one of the suggestions of 
the Tubingen critics, in which they have been much followed, that 
Nicodemus is a person invented to serve as a type of unbelieving, sign- 
seeking Judaism. Why, then, should he be depicted as attaining more 
and more faith (iii. 2, vii. 50, xix. 39) ? The Samaritan woman, on the 
contrary, is said to have been created as a type of the believing heathen. 
With such a design, why was not an actual heathen chosen to play this 
part, instead of a Samaritan who believed in Moses and was looking for 
the Messiah ? ^ But into the details of exegesis it is impracticable here 
to enter.2 

simply the incident [the miracle] at Bethany that is wanting with them ; it 
is the whole period of the life of Jesus with which this incident is connected. 
One comes back always to this fundamental point : The question is, Which of 
the two systems is true, that which makes Galilee the exclusive theatre of the 
activity of Jesus, or that which makes Jesus pass a part of his life at Jerusa- 
lem ? " Of the symbolical explication of the miracle, Renan says : " It is in 
my judgment erroneous. . . . Our Gospel [the fourth] is not in the least 
{nullejnent) symbolical." — Vie de Jesus, 13th ed., pp. 507, 508. 

The miracle at Bethany was not the cause of the crucifixion ; it only led 
the enemies of Jesus to make haste. Therefore it furnished the Synoptists no 
special motive for stepping beyond the lines of their narratives. Indepen- 
dently of this event, the animosity of the priests and Pharisees had previously 
risen to a pitch which made them ready to strike the final blow. Their 
anxiety as to what would be the influence of the miracle (John xi. 47, 48) 
simply quickened their steps. The miracle itself in its nature differs not from 
the instances of raising the dead which are recorded by the Synoptists, for we 
need not suppose here, any more than in those instances, the absolute discon- 
nection of soul and body. 

1 The suggestion that the five husbands of the Samaritan woman symbolize 
the five heathen forms of Samaritan worship — in which case her paramour 
would be spoken of as a symbol of Jehovah ! — is itself a freak of fancy. 

When it is said that the *' disciples had gone away into the city to buy 
food," it is a strained construction to infer that they all went, leaving Jesus 
quite alone. If it was John who remained with him, he had no need to be 
informed of these particulars. 

2 For a particular examination of Baur's exegesis of the Gospel, see Bey- 
schlag {ui supra) ; also Bruckner's notes to De Wette's Kurze Erkl. d. Evang. 
fohann., and Fisher's The Supernatural Origin of Christianity 3d ed., 
pp. 132 seq. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 283 

Critics of the class here referred to have said that the author of 
this Gospel attaches no value to miracles, setting them up, so to 
speak, merely to bowl them down. This is an error. As he looks 
back upon the Saviour's Hfe, he sees the glory of the Son of God 
in his superhuman works of power and mercy. That which is 
rebuked in the Gospel is the disposition to see nothing in the 
miracles except that which excites wonder or ministers to some lower 
want, instead of discerning their deeper suggestion. Unbelief, even 
when not denying that they were wrought, failed to look through 
them. They were a language the import of which was not divined. 
They were opaque facts. Hence the Jews called for more and 
more. They clamored for something more stupendous. They 
must have a " sign from heaven." This is the view taken of 
miracles in the fourth Gospel. There is not even a remote hint 
that they are not actual occurrences. The narrator does not 
stultify himself in this way. 

In every instance where Baur appeals to exegesis in support of his 
idea of the Evangelist's intent in this matter, he is confuted upon closer 
attention to the passage in hand. For example, when Jesus said, 
" Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed " (xx. 29) 
there is, to be sure, an allusion to the reluctance of Thomas to believe 
without seeing; but to believe what? Why, the miracle of the resur- 
rection, to which the other apostles had testified in his hearing. This 
was the object of faith. Not on faith independent of miracles, but on 
faith not dependent on one's own ocular perception of them, Jesus pro- 
nounces his blessing. 

And here it may be observed that there is no kind of miracle, 
none calling for the exertion of any species or degree of power, 
which, has not its parallel in the Synoptics. In Mark, Jesus stills 
the tempest (ch. v.), feeds the multitude (chs. vi., viii.), and raises 
the dead (ch. v.). 

From the historical character and the spirit of the Gospel, we 
turn to the second branch of this inquiry, its theological aspect. 
It is contended by Baur and numerous later critics that the con- 
ception of the Word (Logos) in the Gospel is appropriated from 
the Alexandrian Judaism of Philo, and is the idea which gives form 
and color to its doctrinal contents. These two propositions are 
really the main fortress on which they rely. Neither of them can be 
sustained. The structure of which they furnish the materials is, 
therefore, untenable. 



284 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The term " Logos " in the Jewish theology is of Palestinian origin. 

In the Old Testament this Word as an abstraction has divine attri- 
butes attached to it.^ The ^' Word " is personified. ^ It is spoken of 
as an instrument of creation.^ " By the word of the Lord were the 
heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth." 
'' He spake, and the light came into being.'^ ^ He " spake " unto Moses 
and the prophets. In the Jewish Targums — which in their present 
form, to be sure, are not earlier than the third century, materials of 
which, however, go back to the apostolic age — the Word is personal. 
In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is personified and described as taking 
part in the work of creation, being the first creature of God and the typi- 
cal source oi himian wisdom. In the Old Testament apocryphal books, 
the Son of Sirach, the author of the original of which was a Hebrew of 
Palestinian birth, and especially in the Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom is 
personified in a still more vivid way. In the former book. Wisdom is 
made to say, " I came out of the mouth of the Most High and covered 
the earth as a cloud " ; ^ " He created [or preserved] me from the be- 
ginning before thy world." ^ The Lord is said to have commanded 
Wisdom to make her abode in Israel."^ 

The roots of Philo's conception of the Logos were in these Old 
Testament and apocryphal sources. 

But with Philo, along with what was drawn from the wisdom 
literature, were commingled kindred conceptions of the Logos, 
derived from Plato, and especially from Stoic teaching. In the 
prologue of the Gospel, there is nothing that might not have been 
drawn from Palestinian sources earlier than the apocryphal books 
referred to. Certain points of resemblance to Philo's teaching 
may thus be accounted for. But the points of difference from 
Philo are fundamental. 

In the Gospel, the Logos is personal. Not so in Philo. The current 
of his teaching is of an opposite tenor, and these passages admit of an in- 
terpretation consistent with what, generally speaking, is plainly his view.^ 
In Philo, Logos usually signifies the Platonic idea of reason. In the 

1 Ps. xxiii. 4 ; cxix. 89 ; cv. ; Is. xl. 8. 

2 Ps. evil. 20 ; cxlvii. 15 ; xviii. ; Is. Iv. il. * Gen. i. ^ Ch. xxiv. 3. 
^ Ps. xxxiii. 6. ^ Ch. xxiv. 3. '^ Ibid.^ v. 8. 
^ See Drummond, The Alexandrian Philosophy of Philo ; Dorner, Ent- 

wickelungsgesch. d, Lehre d. Person Christi, vol. i. pp. 19, 20 seq. The utmost 
that can be claimed is that Philo shows a tendency to personalize the Logos. 
But this was not pecuhar to Philo or to Alexandria. See Sanday (in review 
of Schiirer), The Expositor, 1892, p. 286. Nor is the Logos in Philo eternal, 
nor even divine, save firom the human point of view. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 285 

Gospel, this conception does not appear. Once more — and this contra- 
riety is vital — the central thought of the prologue of the Gospel — that 
of the Incarnation of the Logos — is in conflict with the philosophy of 
Philo. His system is dualistic. In it matter is alien to the Deity. Noth- 
ing could clash more directly with the system of Philo than the Declara- 
tion of the Evangelist, "the Logos became flesh " (i. 41). The Judaic 
gnosticism in which the Incarnation was merely apparent, a temporary 
connection of the divine Logos with the man Jesus, was the logical out- 
come of the Philonian speculation. Cerinthus carried out the dualistic 
theory. He taught that the heavenly Christ joined himself to Jesus at 
his baptism, but forsook him at the passion. It was Cerinthus, who 
probably began his career at Alexandria, against whom, it is stated by 
Irenaeus, the apostle John wrote. 

It is possible that the use of the term " Logos " by the Evangelist 
was owing, or partly owing, to its having become familiar in cur- 
rent talk, which in some measure was traceable to the school of 
Philo. This is a question of minor consequence. The important 
fact is that, instead of borrowing from Philo the contents of the 
conception, his sources are Biblical, and whatever is non-Biblical 
in the Alexandrian idea is absent. 

It is an eloquent fact that the beginning and end of the statements 
concerning the Logos are in the few verses of the prologue. It 
does not appear in the teachings of Jesus that follow. However, 
and for whatever reason, the designation may have been selected, 
the idea the Evangelist derives from the impression made 
by Jesus and by his testimony respecting himself. The confident 
assertion, often as it is made, that the prologue and theology of 
the Gospel are of Alexandrian origin, is not supported by the 
evidence.^ The verdict of ecclesiastical history is decisively 
against it. 

The following are observations of Harnack : — 

" The reference to Philo and Hellenism does not avail in the least to 
explain satisfactorily even the external side of the problem. No Greek 
speculations respecting the divine nature have had an influence in the 
Johannean theology. Even the Logos has little more in common with 
the Philonian Logos than the name." It is " out of the old faith of 

1 In favor of a predominant influence of Philo in the Gospel are : Reville, 
Jesus de Nazareth, vol. i. pp. 336 seq. ; Weizsacker, Das Apostol. Zeitalter, 2d 
ed., p. 531 ; Holtzmann, Lehrbiich d. A'. T. Theologje, vol. ii. pp. 368 seq. 
Also Aal, Der Logos (1886, 1889), and Grill, Untersuchh. ii. d. Ensteh. d. 4ten 
Evangel. (1902). 



286 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

prophets and apostles" that "the apostolic testimony concerning Christ 
has created a new faith in one who lived among Greeks. . . . Even 
this proves incontestably that the author, despite pronounced anti- 
Judaism, must be regarded as being a born Jew." 

"The prologue," Harnack proceeds to say, "is not the key to the 
understanding of the Gospel, but it prepares in advance the Hellenic 
readers for the understanding of it. It makes a connection with a great 
conception, that of the Logos, with which they were acquainted, remoulds 
and transforms it — by implication combating false Christologies — in 
order to substitute for it Jesus Christ, the only begotten God (fiovo- 
yevr]<i deos), or to unveil the Logos as being this Jesus Christ. 
The moment this is done the Logos conception is dropped. The 
author speaks in the narrative only of Jesus, with the purpose to estab- 
lish the faith that he is the Messiah, the Son of God. This faith has 
for its chief element the recognition that Jesus comes forth {stam7n{) 
from God and from heaven ; but the author is far from attempting to 
produce this recognition in a philosophical way, by cosmological views. 
It is on the ground of his testimony respecting himself, and because he 
has brought the full knowledge of God and Life — brought absolutely 
super-terrestrial, divine blessings (^Gilter) — that Jesus, according to the 
Evangelist, shows himself to be the Messiah, the Son of God." ^ "I 
believe," says the same author, " that I am right in asserting that it 
would never have occurred to any one to identify the Johannean Christ 
with the Alexandrian or with any personified divine Logos, if this iden- 
tification had not been made in the prologue." ^ 

Another master in the field of church history, Professor Loofs, 
writes thus : — 

" It is no matter where the word ^ Logos,' used by John, may have 
come from. Of what was possible on Palestinian ground, too little in 
connection with this question, in my opinion, has been said : compare 
Son of Sirach xxiv. not only with John i. 1-18, but also with viii. yj seq. 
and XV. i seq.''"' Loofs shows that with John the Logos conception is 
not connected with philosophical thoughts. His idea is that "in 
Christ the Word of God which called the world into being and all along 
has been the life and light of men, has become a human person; that 
Christ not only brings God's Word, he is it ; he is the God become 
visible and apprehensible (John i. 14; i John i. i).^ 

^ Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, 3d ed., p. 93. 

2 Zeitschr. fur Theol. u. Kirche, vol. i. 2, p. 211. 

s Real Encykl. d. Theol. u. Kirche, 3d. ed,, vol. iv, p. 29 (art. " Christo- 
logie"). 

Dr. E. A. Abbott (in the art. " Gospels," Encycl. Brit., vol. x.) traces various 
passages in John to Philo. But why go so far, when the Old Testament fur- 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 287 

An English scholar, as eminent for his candor as for his learning, 
speaking of the essential harmony of the conception of the person of 
Christ in John with the doctrine of Paul and with the conception in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, remarks, "We can well understand how 
almost any strong wind might blow in the direction of the apostle 
[John] the one luminous word for which we may suppose him to be 
seeking."^ 

The preexistence of Christ and his cosmical relation, his agency 
in the creation, are plainly taught in i Cor. viii. 6 ; 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; 
Phil. ii. 6. Scepticism respecting the Pauline authorship of the 
Colossians and Ephesians is steadily giving way under the weight 
of evidence for their genuineness. In these writings, in Colossians 
especially, the exaltation of Christ and his broad, universal rela- 
tion are set forth, to serve as an antidote to a Judaizing theosophy 
with which was connected a worship of angels. Certain passages 
in Colossians and Ephesians have suggested that the Evangelist 
was not unacquainted with the apostle Paul's teaching. But there 

nishes abundant materials suggestive of the imagery which is contained in 
every passage to which Dr. Abbot refers ? The Evangelist's account of the 
visit of the Samaritan woman to the well (ch. iv.) is said to remind us of 
Philo's contrast between Hagar at the well and Rebekah {^Posterity of Cain^ 
xli.). Why, then, does the Evangelist make the woman carry a pitcher, like 
Rebekah, while in Philo one point of the contrast is that she carries a 
"leathern bag"? The reader who will consult an English concordance 
under the words "well," "wells," "water," "waters," "living water," "foun- 
tain," " fountains," " drink," will see how much closer the parallels are be- 
tween John iv. and the Old Testament than between that chapter and Philo. 
For example, for "wells of salvation," see Isa. xii. 2 ; compare Prov. x. ii, 
xvi. 22, xviii. 4. For "fountain of living water," see Jer. ii. 13; compare 
Isa. Iviii. 1 1 ; Jer. xvii. 13 ; Cant. iv. 15. See also Rev. xxi. 6, which will not 
be attributed to Philo. "Ye drink ; but ye are not filled with drink" (Hag. 
i. 6). As for the figurative use of " bread," the suggestions in the Old Testa- 
ment are numerous. For the expression " bread of heaven," see Ps. cv. 40 ; 
compare Ps. Ixxviii. 15, 16, 20. 

1 Professor Sanday, The Expositor (1892), p. 287. McGiffert judges cor- 
rectly {Apostolic Age, p. 488, n. 2) : " Aside from the term ' Logos,' which is 
confined to the prologue, there is no trace of Philo's term ' Logos.' In fact 
there is more than one passage which runs exactly counter to all Philo's 
thinking (cf., e.g., vi. 37, 44, 66, x. 29). In the light of this fact, the use of 
the term ' Logos ' proves little. It was doubtless already widely current in 
Hellenistic circles, and the author adopted it and put it in the fore part of his 
Gospel, simply because he was convinced that all that his contemporaries 
found in the Logos, he and his fellow-disciples actually had in Christ in visible 
form." 



288 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

is no such resemblance between the Gospel and the Pauline 
Epistles as to imply that the Evangelist was dependent for his 
doctrine upon the apostle. Nothing is more precarious than 
inferences of this sort drawn from phraseology in which " light " 
furnishes a basis for metaphor. 

It is the union of the independence of the Gospel with its unsought 
harmony with the theology of Paul that is an impressive fact. This 
appears, not only in the conception of the person of Christ, but in 
various other particulars. John teaches that " life " begins here, in the 
knowledge of God and of his Son (John iii. 36; i John v. 12). Life 
inseparable from fellowship with Christ is the truth on which emphasis 
is laid. Judgment is here : the gospel does its own work of separation 
by testing and revealing the affinities of the heart ; yet the objective, 
atoning work of Christ is not ignored, nor is the resurrection and the 
final awards (John iii. 14, 15, v. 28, 29; i John i. 7, ii. 2). Paul con- 
nects the breaking down of the wall of separation between Jew and 
Gentile with the death of Christ (Gal. iii. 13, 14). In remarkable har- 
mony with this conception are the words of Jesus when he was informed 
(John xii. 20 seq^ that Greeks who had come up to the passover de- 
sired to see him. It was a sign to him that his hour had come. The 
corn of wheat, in order not to " abide alone," but that it might bear 
fruit, must " fall into the ground and die." 

In the forefront of the Gospel stands the announcement, " The 
Word became flesh." To support the groundless opinion that to 
the Evangehst the incarnation was a circumstance of no account, 
a Docetic junction of the Logos with the man Jesus, Baur erro- 
neously makes the verses 9-14 refer to the preexistent word. 
They refer to the incarnate Christ. The unprejudiced reader of 
the Gospel cannot fail to perceive that it is the historic Jesus, as 
he had hved, taught, consorted with his disciples, hung upon the 
cross, and risen from the tomb, on whom the attention of the Evan- 
gelist centres. " The prevalence, nay, the ubiquity, of the Messi- 
anic idea is the key to the motive of the narrative." This truth is 
illustrated, fully and ably, by Harnack.^ 

"As strongly," says Loofs, "as the deity of Christ is emphasized in 
the Gospel of John, as indubitably as Christ appears as a preexistent 
subject (i. 14, viii. 58, xvii. 5), even so without reserve is Christ called 
a man (viii. 40, x. 33, xi. 47, 50). The narrative tells of his becoming 
tired and thirsting (iv. 61), of his weeping (xi. 35), of his being troubled 
in spirit (xii. 37), of his brothers (vii. 3), of his solicitude for his 

1 See the references above. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 289 

mother (xix. 16 scg.^ ; yea, the Evangelist even lets him speak of his 
God and our God (xx. 17). From all Docetism is the Gospel as far 
as possible removed (cf. i John iv. 3). Even by the corpse the Evan- 
gelist in the most solemn manner authenticates the reality of the cor- 
poreal manifestation of the Lord (xix. 34)."^ Loofs differentiates 
this view from the " caricature of the Johannean theology " by Holtzman, 
Pfleiderer, and others. 

The plea that the type of doctrine in the fourth Gospel is an 
a priori construction on the basis of an abstract idea, borrowed 
from Alexandrian Jewish philosophy, has no foothold. 

The argument on the side adverse to the genuineness of the 
Gospel, so far as its contents are concerned, must rest, if it has a 
resting-place anywhere, on the alleged inconsistency of the 
Johannean history of Jesus with the Synoptical narratives. 

In the first place, the argument professes or implies a misjudg- 
ment respecting the Synoptic Gospels. They make no claim to be 
full biographies, and manifestly this character does not belong to 
them. They are made up of materials — partly of short sayings and 
parables — that would most easily lodge in the memory and be 
transmitted orally. As far as incidents in distinction from teaching 
are concerned, the current critical opinion accepts Mark as one of 
the principal sources. It was made use of by the first and the third 
Evangelists. It is obvious that this document is an invaluable 
sketch, but still a bare sketch, of the ground which it covers. It 
is an account at second-hand, not the writing of an apostle. Why 
should it be assumed that the second Gospel is to be the gauge 
for determining what credit shall be given to the fourth ? That it 
was written first warrants no such inference. Prior to an investi- 
gation of the contents of the two sources, the fourth, to say the 
least, has a claim to equal confidence. Until the tradition of the 
Church has been disproved, the precedence belongs to its author 
as being an intimate follower of Jesus. Even if, as some main- 
tain, a non-apostolic author who was a disciple of John supple- 
mented and edited the apostle's writing, this author stands on a 
level with Mark. Not a few critics, when the origin and credibil- 
ity of the fourth Gospel are under discussion, assume at the start 
for the Synoptics a precedence as authorities which is not justified 
by the canons of historical criticism. 

Our second remark pertains to the relation of the Synoptics to 

1 Realencykl. fur prot. Theol. u. K., ed. 3, vol. iv. p. 29. 
U 



290 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

one another. The circumstance that Mark's Gospel is thought to 
have been one of the principal sources of the narrative matter in 
Matthew and in Luke, is fallaciously used to lessen comparatively 
the credit of these two authorities. Mark is cited by not a few as 
" the oldest authority," and the contents of his Gospel as " the 
earliest tradition," — only the Logia of Matthew being older. But 
there is nothing to oblige us to suppose that the narrative matter 
in Luke (for example) which Mark does not contain, is from any 
" later " source than Mark's narrative. The long passage which 
belongs to Luke exclusively, from ch. ix. 51 to ch. xviii. 14, 
embraces materials as trustworthy and as " early " (if we look at 
the sources whence Luke derived them) as the accounts given 
by Mark. We know that Mark does not record the greater part of 
the sayings of Jesus which were in the Logia of Matthew. There is 
no doubt that he omitted to gather up much more besides, which 
another inquirer, like Luke, might have ascertained from "eye- 
witnesses and ministers of the word." To reject historical ac- 
counts, therefore, or summarily to set them on a lower footing, 
merely because they are not comprised in an historical sketch as 
brief as that of Mark, is quite without warrant. Forthwith to 
assign additional circumstances, or variations of statement, in a 
parallel account of Matthew or of Luke, to a " second " or later 
evangelic tradition, is frequently, to say the least, to build upon 
imagination rather than logic. The amount of detail in an his- 
torical document is no sure criterion of its age. 

In the third place, it is clear that, on the supposition of the 
apostolic authorship of the fourth Gospel, a certain subjective ele- 
ment is perceptible in its contents. Imagine that an aged dis- 
ciple, who has long been in the habit of musing on the doings and 
the sayings of Jesus, undertakes to set down his reminiscences. 
Might he not be spontaneously led to tell the tale in his own lan- 
guage ? Would it be strange if it were to be tinged with a hue 
imparted by his own meditations? Should it even occasion sur- 
prise if, here and there, in his recaUing of what Christ said, there 
were to mingle, without advertisement to the reader, an explana- 
tory comment? This suggestion does not imply that the Gospel 
resembles even remotely that species of biography (or autobiogra- 
phy) which goes under the name of Dichtimg und Wahrheit — 
wherein truth and poesy are of set purpose indistinguishably 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 29 1 

blended. We are only required to assume that the acts and words 
of the Master are steeped, rather than mechanically held, in the 
memory of the devoted disciple. Moreover, the effect of conden- 
sation, the signs of which are sometimes apparent to the reader, 
must be taken into account. It need not occasion surprise if in New 
Testament narratives the ancient habit of using the ofatio recta 
in reports of discourses and conversation should be exemplified. 

The longer ministry of Jesus — extending to at least two years 
and a half, and probably to three years and a half — and his 
extended labors in Judaea are prominent features with the fourth 
Evangelist. But the Evangelist's representation of the life and 
ministry of Christ, although independent, is not in conflict with 
that of the Synoptics. The " country " of Jesus, it is to be 
observed, is still Gahlee; for this is the right interpretation of 
John iv. 44. What the Galileans had seen him do in Jerusalem 
excited in Galilee, on his return, an interest in him not manifested 
before. Luke, in the long passage relating to the last journey of 
Jesus to Jerusalem (ix. 51 to xviii. 14), brings together matter of 
which a portion appears to have its place in the Judaean ministry. 
Independently of such particulars as the relation of Christ to the 
family of Mary and Martha, the lament of Jesus over Jerusalem 
(Luke xiii. 34 seq.\ Matt, xxiii. 37 seq.^ requires us to assume 
that he had frequently taught there. " How often," — these words 
in this lament must have included more than one short visit. The 
apostrophe plainly refers to the city, not to the Jewish people as a 
whole, to whom Baur, and not he alone, would arbitrarily apply it. 
In Luke, the preceding verse reads, " For it cannot be that a 
prophet perish out of Jerusalem y This passage establishes on 
the authority of the Synoptics the fact of the longer Judaean min- 
istry of Jesus, and so endorses the testimony of the fourth Gospel 
in this important particular. Luke (vi. i) distinctly implies the 
intervention of at least one passover after the beginning and before 
the close of his public life. The deep and abiding impression 
made by Jesus is far less a mystery if we accept the chronology of 
the fourth Gospel than if we conceive his activity to have been 
confined to about a twelvemonth. The truth appears to be, that 
in the early oral narration of the life and teaching of Christ, 
perhaps for the reason that his labors in Jerusalem and the neigh- 
borhood were already more familiar to the Christians there, it was 
mainly the Galilean ministry that was described. The matter was 



292 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

massed under the three general heads of his baptism and inter- 
course with John the Baptist, his work in Galilee, and the visit to 
Jerusalem at the passover, when he was crucified. 

If the author of the fourth Gospel was not John, but a disciple of the 
apostle, or if he was some other immediate disciple of Jesus himself, 
no explanation can be given for the assumed erroneous chronology. 
The author, whoever he was, could easily have brought Jesus more fre- 
quently into conflict with the Pharisees, if that were his purpose, in 
other places than in Judaea. He might have interposed visits between 
the two passovers. Why should he set up a false chronological scheme 
which could only tend to arouse suspicion? The writer, whoever he 
was, was evidently acquainted with one, if not all, of the earlier Gos- 
pels.^ Why did he not set his new portrait into the old frame? It is 
reasonable to think that it was because he was conversant with the 
facts, and consciously had such an acknowledged authority in the 
Church that he had no reason to fear contradiction. 

The cleansing of the temple (John ii. 13 seq.) is connected in 
the Synoptics with the last passover, this being the only passover 
with which, in their scheme of chronology, it could be placed. 
The cleansing of the temple may well have occurred at the time 
assigned to it in the fourth Gospel. The booths of " the sons of 
Annas " had become a scandal among the Jews. His feeling re- 
specting the temple, even in childhood, had been expressed in 
his question to his parents, " Wist ye not that I must be in my 
Father's House? " (Luke i. 49). The holy indignation prompting 
to the expulsion of the money-changers, this outbreaking of pro- 
phetic energy, would naturally stifle any disposition to resist him. 
The impression just made on the people at large by the vehement 
rebukes of John the Baptist would have a like effect. Renan sees 
this to be probable. 

Another subject of comparison between the fourth Gospel and 
the Synoptics relates to the day of the month when Christ was 
crucified. Was the Friday of the crucifixion the 14th, or the 15th, 
of the month Nisan? And was the Last Supper on the usual day 
of the passover meal, or on the evening before ? Many scholars 
are of opinion that here is a discrepancy between the fourth Evan- 
gehst and the other three ; that he, unlike them, makes the Last 
Supper to have occurred on the evening prior to the day on which 
the passover lamb was killed and eaten, and the crucifixion to 
have taken place on the next morning. Bleek, Neander, Weiss, 

1 See, e.g., John iii. 24. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 293 

Westcott, Ellicott, and numerous others, admit the discrepancy, 
but argue in support of the accuracy of the fourth Gospel in this 
particular.^ Some of the proofs are drawn from incidental re- 
marks by the Synoptists themselves, and from the anterior proba- 
bility, since the passover itself was a sacred festival. On the other 
hand, it has been contended that the author of the fourth Gospel 
purposely misdated these events in order to make the crucifixion 
synchronize with the slaying of the paschal lamb, his intent being 
to instil the idea that the passover is superseded by the offering of 
Christ, *' the Lamb of God." If the discrepancy really exists, it 
furnishes no ground for ascribing the inaccuracy to the fourth Gos- 
pel. The motive assigned by the Tiibingen school for the alleged 
falsification of the date is insufficient. In the first place, if the 
author of the Gospel had wanted to exhibit Christ as the antitype 
of the paschal lamb, he had no need to alter the received chronol- 
ogy. Christ is termed by Paul "our passover" (i Cor. v. 7). 
In the second place, it is not certain even that the Evangelist in- 
tends to ascribe this character to Christ. The appellation " Lamb 
of God " may have been taken, not from Ex. xxix. ^S seq.^ 
but from Isa. liii. 7. It is more probable that the passage 
quoted by the Evangelist, " A bone of him shall not be broken " 
(xix. 36), is cited from Ps. xxxiv. 20 than from the law rela- 
tive to the paschal offering (Ex. xii. 46; Num. ix. 12).^ Had 
the Evangelist thought that the minute identification of Jesus with 
the paschal lamb was so very important that he would venture to 
set up a false date in the teeth of the received Gospels, he would 
have been likely to make the parallelism plain to the reader. He 
would not have been content with a very obscure suggestion. The 
author of the Gospel, whoever he was, was a devout believer in 
Jesus. How, then, could he himself have thought it a vital matter 
that Christ, as the antetype of the paschal lamb, should die on the 
14th of Nisan, if he knew that it was not the fact? 

The Quartodeciman observance in Asia Minor is a topic closely con- 
nected with the foregoing. That was on the 14th of Nisan. But what 

^ The fourth Gospel was thought to agree with the Synoptics by Dr. E. 
Robinson, Wieseler, Tholuck, Norton ; Keil, Komin. uber das Evang. d. Matt., 
pp. 513-528 ; Luthardt, A'o;///;z. i'lher das Evang. Johann ; McLellan, The Nei.0 
Testament, etc., vol. i. pp. 473-494 ; and others. The current of critical opinion 
is in the opposite direction. 

2 See Hutton's thoughtful essay on John's Gospel {Essays, vol. i. p. 195) ; 
Weiss-Meyer, Komtn. (John xix. 36). 



294 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

did it commemorate? Many scholars have thought that it was the cru- 
cifixion of Jesus. If this be so, it supports that interpretation of the 
fourth Gospel which would make it set the crucifixion on the morning 
before the paschal lamb was killed and eaten, and at the same time it 
confirms the Evangelist's testimony on this point. But since the able 
essay of Schiirer, his opinion, which agrees substantially with that de- 
fended earlier by Bleek and Gieseler, has gained favor, that the Quarto- 
deciman Supper on the evening of the 14th of Nisan was at the outset 
the Jewish passover, kept at the usual time, but transformed into a 
Christian festival. John found the festival in being when he came to 
Asia Minor, and may well have left it to stand, " whether he regarded 
the 13th or the 14th as the day of the Last Supper.'' 1 It is certain 
that when the controversy about the festival was rife, the defenders of 
the Quartodeciman practice in Asia found nothing in the fourth Gospel 
to clash with their views, and appealed in behalf of their rite to the 
authority of the apostle John. Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, toward 
the end of the second century, pointed back to his example, designating 
him as the apostle " who leaned on the bosom of the Saviour." It ap- 
pears quite astonishing that a Gospel should have been composed in a 
spirit of antagonism to the tenet of the Quartodecimans, but have 
treated the matter so obscurely that their leaders failed to discover in it 
anything opposed to their custom. It is not agreed what precise posi- 
tion on the paschal controversy was taken by Apollinaris, Bishop of 
Hierapolis, the successor, and it may be the next successor, of Papias, 
in the second century. But this is known, that he recognized the 
fourth Gospel, and made his appeal to it. We may dismiss the Quarto- 
deciman discussion, since it affords, even in the view of some of the 
ablest opponents of the Johannean authorship of the fourth Gospel, of 
whom Schiirer is one, no support for their opinion on this subject. 

The character and mission of John the Baptist, what he did 
and said, and his attitude in relation to Christ and the gospel, 
were evidently of very deep interest to the author of the fourth 
Gospel. In considering the statements of the Evangelist on this 
subject, we must bear in mind that, as John the Baptist stood at a 
point of transition from one stage of development to a higher, so 
the apostle John, having shared in this experience, had advanced 
beyond its earlier stage, and looked back upon it with the clear 
perception of its nature which was gained from his advanced 
point of view. Neander, with his usual historical sagacity, has 
commented on the effect of this new enlightenment. 

" Truths not seen clearly by John the Baptist stood clearly before 
the mind of the Evangelists. But this very fact may have caused the 
^ Schiirer, Zeitschr.filr hist. 1 heoL, 1870, pp. 182 seq. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 295 

obscurity which we find in their accounts of the Baptist. ... If, 
therefore, we find on close inquiry that the historical statements are 
somewhat obscured by subjective influences, our estimate of their verity 
need be in no wise affected thereby." ^ 

It requires no argument to confirm the statement of the Gos- 
pels that Jesus was brought into a close relation to John the Bap- 
tist. Had he not been, considering the widespread excitement 
which was kindled by the preacher in the wilderness, whose power- 
ful influence is attested by Josephus, there would be cause for 
wonder. Nazareth was a village, but it was not an obscure 
village. From the hills around it, "which were everywhere 
within the limits of the village boys' playground," could be 
seen the valley of the Jordan as well as the waters of the Medi- 
terranean. Caravans from the fords of the river could be watched 
as they wound around the base of the plain on which the village 
stood.- 

Nothing can be plainer than that the Evangelist meant his 
readers to understand that Jesus was baptized by John (John i. 
32-34), although even this has been questioned. When Mat- 
thew's relation (iii. 13-17) is compared with the parallel synoptical 
accounts, the reasonable conclusion is that the vision of the Bap- 
tist gave him the full assurance that Jesus was in truth the Mes- 
siah. This does not exclude the supposition that a simultaneous 
vision confirmed Jesus himself in the consciousness of his Messianic 
mission. The subsequent exclamation ascribed to John the Bap- 
tist (vs. 29), when he saw Jesus approaching, "Behold the Lamb 
of God," etc., may have been an outburst of devout enthusiasm 
which sprung from a prescience, growing out of his own experi- 
ence, that a mortal struggle with the corrupt part of the people 
awaited the heaven-sent Messiah.^ 

Besides this matter of the circumstances attending the baptism 
of Jesus, the entire narrative in the fourth Gospel of his relations 
to the Forerunner furnishes to some critics a reason for impeach- 
ing its credibility.^ In the Synoptics the imprisonment of John 

^ Neander, Lebeii /esu, pp. 69 seq. ; American translation, p. 46 seq. 

2 See Professor George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy 
Land, pp. 432, 433. ^ See Neander, Leben Jesu, pp. 260, 261. 

* E.g., on the passage quoted and the context, Reville says, " C'etait en- 
core une maniere de faire ressortir la superiorite de Jesus." Jesus de Naza- 
reth, vol. ii. p. 20, n. 



296 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

follows immediately upon the account of the temptation of Jesus. 
When he heard of this imprisonment, " Jesus withdrew into Gali- 
lee." Then followed the call to Peter, to his brother Andrew, to 
John and to James, to attach themselves to him as his followers. 
In John there intervenes an account of the connection of the 
first three with John the Baptist, how he pointed out Jesus to John 
and Andrew, who spent the day with him, and how, the next day, 
xAndrew brought to Jesus his brother Simon Peter. Then follows 
the journey to Capernaum and the brief stay there prior to the 
visit of Jesus to Jerusalem to attend the passover. Learning that 
the Pharisees had heard that he was baptizing more disciples than 
John, he left Judaea again for Galilee. The Evangelist takes pains 
to correct the impression as to the chronology, which the Synoptics 
would make, by saying explicitly that at this time " John was not 
yet cast into prison" (iii. 24). The question is whether in all 
this we have truth or invention. The negative criticism does not 
hesitate to affirm that we have in all this a falsification of history. 
It is a pretty hard accusation ; but let us look at the probabilities 
in the case. The order of occurrences in the first and third Gos- 
pels, the critics assure us, follows that in Mark. In his narrative 
we are informed that Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw the 
fishermen, Peter and Andrew, casting their nets, and James and 
John. At his bidding they immediately quit their nets and their 
boats and join him (Mark i. 20). He had only to say to the 
first pair, " Come ye after me and I will make you fishers of men," 
"And straightway they left their nets and followed him." He 
had only to utter a word of summons to the second pair, " and 
they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, 
and went after him." They instantly abandon their occupations, 
and become his permanent companions. In the fourth Gospel 
circumstances are related which explain the seemingly abrupt call 
and the instantaneous compliance with it. It was not the begin- 
ning of their acquaintance with Jesus. Their connection with him 
before was loose and not permanent. They had met him in the 
neighborhood of the Jordan, had gone with him into Judaea, and 
after John was delivered up had journeyed with him back to Gali- 
lee. It need occasion no surprise that the brief sketch of Mark 
should begin with the call of Peter to permanent discipleship. 
That the Baptist should have looked to see the expected kingdom 
of the Messiah set up in a visible, impressive form, is nothing more 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 297 

than what the chosen disciples of Jesus, when they had long been 
under his personal tutelage, had not surrendered (Acts i. 6). 
Hence, after waiting in vain for a signal manifestation of Messianic 
power and dignity on the part of Jesus, the preacher in the wil- 
derness, immured in a prisoner's cell, now that his own work had ap- 
parently ended, grew impatient and perhaps asked himself whether, 
after all, Jesus might not be a second forerunner of the Messiah, 
and sent him a messenger in order to set his mind at rest (Matt, 
xi. 3). If the account of the acquaintance of Jesus with the 
Baptist which is presented in the fourth Gospel is false, who 
invented it ? The ablest supporters of the negative criticism hold 
at present that either the apostle John himself, or one of his 
immediate disciples, or, possibly, another disciple of Jesus himself, 
furnished materials for the Gospel narrative. Whichever it was, 
shall an invention of this sort be credited to him ? We have a 
hfe-like picture of what occurred. John sees Jesus coming to him 
and points him out to those about him. The next day, when John, 
in the hearing of two of his disciples, again pointed him out, these 
follow him. Jesus turns and sees them coming after him. Then 
the further details are given. This is either a true or a menda- 
cious narrative. The notion that the three consecutive days in 
this passage are an artificial triad, and one of a number of like 
fictions in the Gospel, is a fancy of certain critics.^ This rooted 
suspicion is dealt with scornfully even by one of the most radical 
of the writers on the Introduction to the New Testament.^ 

What is recorded of the relation of the Baptist to Jesus after his 
baptism is, in its main particulars, not discordant with the proba- 
bilities in the case. The Kingdom of God was not yet set up. It 
was still in the future. Until the Messiah should make it a tangi- 
ble reality, the work of the Forerunner in preparing for it was to 
go on. Accordingly, John did not suspend his preparatory work. 
He contented himself with introducing two or three of his most 
sympathetic disciples to him who was " to increase " — whose 

1 See Holtzmann, Einl. in d. N. T., p. 426. 

2 Julicher, Einl. in. d. N. T., p. 238, who says : " Eine mit raffinirter 
Kunst auzgedachte Gliederung, einen im Grossen wie in Kleinigkeiten (z. B. i. 
I, 2, 3) durchgefiihrten Schematismus von Dreiheiten, hat man in Joh. hinein- 
geheimnisst. Die meisten dieser Dreiheiten diirfte der Verfasser selber nicht 
bemerkt haben, und die allerverschiedensten Dispositionen lassen sich mit 
gleichen Rechte als von ihm beabsichtigt vertreten," etc. 



298 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

influence was to grow — while he himself was "to decrease." It 
is natural that some of his disciples were more susceptible than 
others, and that after the prophet was taken away the development 
of his disciples varied. Before this time, some of them were net- 
tled at the increasing number of the disciples of Jesus (John iii. 
26 seq.). Later (Acts xix. i seq.) we hear of some in whom 
" there was a mixture of impressions left by John the Baptist with 
scattered accounts received of Christ." ^ 

The principal thing rehed upon to disprove the genuineness of 
the fourth Gospel is the account which is given there of the way 
in which Jesus himself is known as the Messiah and came to be 
recognized as such by his disciples. The disclosure was much 
later, it is said, than the fourth Evangehst makes it to be, and the 
perception of this truth by the followers of Jesus was gradual. 
Hence, for one thing, the entire account in the Gospel of the per- 
sonal meeting of disciples of John with Jesus is discredited. In 
support of this principal count in the indictment of the Evangehst* 
the appeal is made to the passage in Mark (viii. 27-30), which 
relates the conversation at Caesarea Philippi. We read that in 
answer to the question of Jesus, "Who say ye that I am?" 
Peter avows his faith in him as the Messiah, a declaration for 
which he is commended by Christ. This incident is made the 
basis of the inference that up to this time the apostles had not 
looked on him as the Messiah, and had not been taught by Jesus 
so to regard him. This criticism must assume that the apostles 
had abandoned their occupations, had left house and home, to fol- 
low Jesus, had listened to his teachings in public and in private, 
and yet had not recognized him as the head of the promised king- 
dom. This opinion, in itself improbable, is disproved even by what 
Mark himself relates of the period before the occurrence of the 
conversation at Caesarea Philippi. The " mightier " one, of whom 
the Baptist spoke (Mark i. 7, 8), whose shoes he was not worthy 
to stoop down and unloose, who was to baptize with the Holy 
Ghost, must have been understood to be the Messiah. In Mark 
(i. 11) we read of the voice from heaven, "Thou art my beloved 
Son." That he was thus at his baptism styled the Messiah could 

^ See Neander, Planting and Training of the Church (Robinson's ed.), 
p. 210. The observations of Neander are one more illustration of his insight 
as an historical critic. They suggest a sufficient answer to Wendt's inferences 
from Acts xix. i seq.^ in Das Johannisevangeliwn, p. 14. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 299 

not have been a secret hidden from the apostles, including Peter. 
In Mark we have the account of the temptation, followed at once 
by the announcement by Jesus (i. 15) that the " time is fulfilled," 
— the time which was to precede " the Kingdom of God." They 
did not ask, or need to ask, who was to be the King. Had they 
not understood that the expected King was he who uttered words 
like these, they would have inquired where and when they should 
look for him. He called the disciples to make them " fishers of 
men " (Mark i. 16). The demoniacs in the hearing of the disci- 
ples hailed him as the Messiah {e.g. Mark i. 24), for the demons, 
Mark tells us (vs. 34), "knew him." They gave him the Messi- 
anic title, "Son of God" (Mark iii. 11). In Mark ii. 10, Jesus 
characterizes himself as the " Son of man " who hath power on 
earth to forgive sins.^ He is the "bridegroom" (ii. 19). What 
else could it signify to those who were familiar with the prophecy 
of Daniel, but the Messiah? "He is the Lord of the Sabbath" 
(ii. 10, 27). At Jericho, blind Bartimeus saluted him with the 
Messianic designation, the "Son of David" (Mark x. 47 seq.). 
The demand of the Pharisees for a sign from heaven (Mark viii. 11) 
implies a well-understood claim on his part to be the predicted 
Messiah. The critics generally unite in holding that the Evange- 
list Matthew had in his hands Mark as well as the apostle Mat- 
thew's Logia (or Discourses) of Jesus. Prior to the conversation 
at Caesarea Philippi, according to Matthew, the disciples had ex- 
plicitly addressed him as the Messiah (Matt. xiv. 2>2>)'^ The peo- 
ple, into whose minds the Pharisees had infused doubts, exclaimed 
on seeing a miracle of healing, " Is this the Son of David ? " (Matt, 
xii. 23, and xii. i seq.). Could the disciples, when they listened 
to the Sermon on the Mount, in which there was an avowed exer- 
cise of supreme legislative authority, a proclamation of the laws of 
the new kingdom, a contrast asserted to exist between him who 
spoke and the prophets, fail to discern that it was no other than 

1 The title " Son of man " in the New Testament was obviously derived from 
the designation of the Messiah in the book of Daniel. If it was not used by the 
people exclusively as a Messianic title, it does not follow that this was not its 
meaning when used by Jesus himself. With him, it was a designation, even 
if it were a " veiled designation," of his Messiahship. See the discussion of 
Dr. Stevens, The Theology of the Neto Testament, ch. iv. 

2 For the many declarations of Jesus in Matthew from the Logia (before 
the record in ch. xvi. 13 seq.), which taught the people as well as the disciples 
that he was the Messiah, see Weiss, Leben Jesu, vol. ii. p. 260, n. 



300 THE GROUNDS OP^ THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the Messiah to whom they were listening? Peter's glowing ex- 
pression of faith at Caesarea Philippi was a spontaneous utterance. 
It was not elicited as a response to any assertion of Jesus that he 
was the Messiah. The question was simply, " Who say ye that 
I am? " The inquiry was occasioned by the falling away of the 
populace, who had wanted to make Jesus a king, but whose hopes 
were disappointed by his failure to encourage them in their scheme. 
Their enthusiasm was chilled. Was it possible that similar mis- 
givings were rising, too, in the minds of the disciples from the 
disappointment of their hopes ? The question put by Jesus was a 
test. It proved that while the people had fallen away from this 
faith, the disciples stood firm. " A renewed spiritual faith in the 
Messiah after all worldly Messianic hopes had been crushed" 
shone out.^ The fourth Gospel (John vi. 66 seq^ records a Hke 
or the same conversation, when Jesus said, " Would ye also go 
away?" The Galilean following had actually melted away. 

When the Gospels are fairly studied they yield a consistent and 
in itself probable view of the course pursued by Jesus in the dis- 
closure of his Messianic calling. In the first place, there is not 
a hint in the records of any denial of it on his part, or of a syl- 
lable from his lips that might tend to mislead in this particular 
those who heard him. In the second place, his Messianic office 
is kept in the background. There is an habitual endeavor to 
prevent the exalted character of his mission from being noised 
abroad. When he wrought miracles, we find connected with them 
an injunction imposing silence on one and another recipient of 
the blessing imparted. At Csesarea Phihppi (Mark viii. 30 ; Matt, 
xvi. 20) he only followed his custom when he charged the disciples 
to " tell no man that he was the Christ." So after the transfigura- 
tion they were to " tell the vision to no man." His motive was 
to forestall a popular demonstration arising out of mistaken, 
worldly anticipations on the part of the multitude. There was 
an imminent danger to guard against. Evidently his aim was 
to instil that belief without raising a commotion. He wanted the 
belief in him as the Messiah to take root. He wanted it to become 
strong enough to meet the trials it would have to encounter, and 
become more and more stable and confident, all the while keeping 

1 See Weiss-Meyer, Komm. in /ohann., ad loc. 

2 Weiss, Leben Jesu, E. Tr., B. VI., cvi. In this chapter, Weiss's interpreta- 
tion of Mark vii. 27-30 is fully sustained. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 30I 

pace with the developing perception of the spiritual idea of the 
Messiah and of his work. It was neither requisite nor was it meet 
to leave a few disciples of John the Baptist, men who were waiting 
for the Kingdom, in ignorance of the true intent and import of 
his mission. It was natural that what they saw at Cana should 
strengthen their new-born faith. " His disciples beheved on him " 
(John ii. 11) ; that is, they were inspired afresh with the convic- 
tion of his Messiahship, instilled into them in their first interviews 
with him. The early part of the ministry of Jesus, his Judaic 
teaching in that period, and the first passover do not belong in 
the plan of the Synoptics. But the reference of what was said 
by him in John ii. 19 and iii. 14 of the temple, and of the serpent 
lifted up, to his death, was an afterthought of the disciples. If the 
allusion in these places was to his Messianic work and to his 
death, the meaning was hidden from them.^ The story of his 
subsequent intercourse with them indicates that there was progress 
in the discipline of their faith, until it became ineradicable, despite 
the deepening shadows which preceded and led up to the cross. 

We have next to consider the discourses of Christ as given in 
the fourth Gospel, in themselves and in comparison with the 
reports of his teaching in the Synoptics. Unquestionably it is the 
distinctive character of this part of the Johannean record, which, 
more than anything else, has been the occasion of doubt as to the 
apostolic authorship. It is an objection to be looked fairly in the 
face. It is only just to remember that the ordinary effect of oral 
repetition of a narrative is to hold fast its salient points, to sift 
out, and perhaps to modify, minor details, and to retain whatever 
home-bred vigor may belong to the phraseology. These traits 
are manifest in the first three Gospels. Again, if the fourth Gos- 
pel is made up of personal recollections of the author, it is not 
strange that it should reflect in a measure his individuality. 
The discourses do not differ materially in style from the other 
parts of the Gospel and from the first Epistle. No doubt it must 
be assumed, and it ought not to be called in question, that the 
teaching of Jesus had been assimilated, and that what we have 
is a reproduction mainly in the author's own language. More is 

^ On these passages, judicious remarks may be read in the valuable work 
of Dr. Forrest, The Christ of History atid of Experience, pp. 99, 100. 



302 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

meant than the turning of Aramaic into Greek. Yet the process 
is a totally different thing from fabrication, and is perfectly 
consistent with substantially faithful recollection. Let a sym- 
pathetic pupil sit at the feet of an inspiring teacher. Sup- 
pose the pupil long after to set out to convey to others, not only 
in another language, but perhaps in a more or less condensed 
form, what he had heard. In places it may take the form of a 
digest. It will be natural to clothe it partly, and sometimes alto- 
gether, in his own phraseology, and even to blend with it, more 
or less, an expository element to assist the comprehension of 
the Hstener. Yet after all it is the teacher who moulds the pupil 
and speaks through him. The essential conceptions of the teacher 
have become the staple of his habitual reflections. The ideas 
and the spirit of the instructor may be transmitted to other minds 
more effectually than could be done otherwise — unless, possibly, 
a verbatim report of his discourses were to be given. It is really 
a sign of essential faithfulness in giving the gist of the discourses 
if the author has so appropriated the Master's teaching that 
here and there he glides into an expansion of it, without notice 
to the reader. Possibly an instance is John iii. 11-21. If so, 
it is not easy to draw the hne between the words of Jesus and 
the thought of the Evangelist. Incidentally we meet with unde- 
signed tokens of the correctness of the Evangelist's memory. 
One striking instance is the words, " Arise, let us go hence " 
(John xiv. 31). These are not explained in the text, but imply 
a simultaneous change of place, — a rising from the table, followed 
either by a continued tarrying in the room or a going forth at once 
toward the garden. To conceive of them as laid into a fictitious 
narrative, although nothing is subjoined to explain what was the 
action that followed them, is absurd.^ 

Who can doubt that Jesus said much more, and, especially in 
converse with his disciples alone, spoke at times in a more continu- 
ous strain than the Synoptists relate ? They preserve, for example, 
but a few sentences uttered by Christ at the Last Supper. Yet he 
sat with the disciples a large part of the night. Here, again, 
the pecuHarity to be expected in an oral tradition, in contrast with 
the more full and connected relation of one who draws from a 

1 If it be supposed that there is a dislocation of the chapters, the words 
quoted stood in the original record of the discourses. On the question of 
dislocations, see above, p. 268, and Appendix, Note 15. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 303 

Store of personal recollections, is observable. But in Christ's 
manner of teaching, there are not wanting in the Synoptic Gospels 
close resemblances to the method of instruction as it appears in 
the discourses in John. Much is said of the use of symbols in the 
Johannean record of the teaching, as in the connecting of physical 
blindness with spiritual (ix. 39-41). But how does this differ 
from such a saying as, " Let the dead bury their dead " (Matt, 
viii. 22) ? It is said that frequently in John figurative expressions 
are not understood by his disciples. But in the Synoptics we 
read such statements as, '' Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees 
and Sadducees" (Matt. xvi. 11) — words which the disciples failed 
to comprehend ; and " He that hath no sword, let him sell his 
garment and buy one "(Luke xxii. 36), which the disciples mis- 
understood, and which Jesus did not stop to interpret to them. 
Such an illustration as that of the good shepherd (ch. x.) in- 
dicates the same mental habit as that which dictated the parables 
found in the first three Gospels. The close examination of the 
two authorities, John and the Synoptics, brings to light numerous 
parallelisms in the mode in which the religious thoughts of Christ 
are expressed — resemblances such as might not catch the atten- 
tion of a cursory reader.^ 

^ On this topic, see Luthardt, Der Johann. Ursprung, etc., pp. 185 seq. ; or 
Godet, Comm., etc., pp. 189 seq.; also Westcott, Comm. on St. John'' s Gospel 
(Am. ed.), pp. Ixxxii. seq. Among the passages are: John ii. 19, "Destroy 
this temple," etc. (Matt. xxvi. 61, xxvii. 40 ; Mark xiv. 58, xv. 29) ; John iv. 
44, "A prophet hath no honor," etc. (Matt. xiii. 57 ; Mark vi. 4 ; Luke iv. 
24) ; John V. 8, " Rise, take up thy bed," etc. (Matt. ix. 5 seq.; Mark ii. 9 ; 
Luke V. 24) ; John vi. 20 (Matt. xiv. 27 ; Mark vi. 50), John vi. 35 (Matt. v. 
6 ; Luke vi. 21) ; John vi. 46 (Matt. xi. 27 ; Luke x. 21 seq.^ ; John xii. 7 
(Matt. xxvi. 12 ; Mark xiv. 8) ; John xii. 8 (Matt. xxvi. 11 ; Mark xiv. 7) ; 
John xii. 25, " He that loveth his life," etc. (Matt. x. 39, xiv. 25 ; Mark viii. 
35 ; Luke ix. 24) ; John xii. 27, " Now is my soul troubled " (Matt. xxvi. 28 ; 
Mark xiv. 34 seq.^ ; John xiii. 3, "knowing that the Father had given all 
things into his hands " (Matt. xi. 27 ; Luke x. 21 seq.^ ; John xiii. 16 (Matt. x. 
24 ; Luke vi. 40) ; John xiii. 20 (Matt. x. 40 ; Luke x. 16) ; John xiii. 21 
(Matt. xxvi. 21 ; Mark xiv. 18) ; John xiii. 38 (Matt. xxvi. 34 ; Mark xiv. 30 ; 
Luke xxii. 34) ; John xiv. i8 (Matt, xxviii. 20) ; John xv. 20 (Matt. x. 25) ; 
John XV, 21 (Matt. x. 22) ; John xvi. 32 (Matt. xxvi. 31 ; Mark xiv. 27) ; John 
xvii. 2 (Matt, xxviii. 18) ; John xviii. 11 (Matt. xxvi. 39, 52 ; Mark xiv, 36 ; 
Luke xxii. 42) ; John xviii. 20 (Matt. xxvi. 55) ; John xviii. 33 (Matt, xxvii. 
11) ; John XX. 23 (Matt. xvi. 19 and xviii. 18). The terms "life" and "eter- 
nal life " are found in Matthew, and are even interchanged with " kingdom of 
heaven." Compare Matt, xviii. 3 with ver. 8 ; xix. 17 with ver. 23 ; xxv. 34 



304 THE GROUNDS OP THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The relation of the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptics and in 
John respectively has been compared to the relation of the teach- 
ing of Socrates in Xenophon to the representation of it in Plato. 
This analogy, if not carried too far, is just. That Socrates had 
another vein in his conversations than is represented in the Memo- 
rabilia is indicated occasionally in Xenophon's work. We have to 
explain how it happened that he fascinated Plato as well as Xeno- 
phon. More distinctly in the Synoptics appears the same vein 
of teaching which is prominent in the fourth Gospel. If the sig- 
nificance and importance of personal union and fellowship with 
Jesus stand out more conspicuously in this Gospel, still the differ- 
ence is one of degree. The spirit of the Synoptical teaching is not 
out of harmony with the words to which it gives a central place : 
" Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will 
give you rest," etc. (Matt. v. 28 seq,^. The following words might 
naturally fall from the same lips, " Peace I leave with you ; my 
peace I give unto you ; not as the world giveth, give I unto you " 
(John xiv. 27). 

As regards theology, we meet in the Synoptics traces of essentially 
the same teaching which meets us in the fourth Gospel. The 
memorable passage in Matt. xi. 27, "No man knoweth the Son 
but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, 
and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him," is in substance 
and style identical with what is familiar in John. It is a specimen 
of that sort of teaching respecting himself and his relation to God 
which we should expect Christ to impart to his followers. Is it 
probable that he would have left them quite in the dark on those 
questions respecting which they must have yearned for light, and 
which are leading topics in the fourth Gospel? The institution 
of the Lord's Supper as it is recorded in the Synoptics strongly 
suggests that teaching respecting his person and the spiritual re- 
ception of himself — such teaching as we find in John vi. — had 

with ver. 46 ; ix. 45 with ver. 47. These resemblances to the Synoptics are 
wholly inartificial. Holtzmann's attempt to show that words and phrases are 
culled from the Synoptists by the author of the fourth Gospel, and put to- 
gether in a kind of mosaic, is a failure. The inference finds no warrant in 
the data brought forward to sustain it. The fourth Gospel is as far as possi- 
ble from being a composite of scraps of phraseology picked up from different 
sources. It has a homogeneous character, a continuity, a life, which it never 
could have had if it had been composed in the mechanical way supposed. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 305 

been previously given to the disciples. Else how could his words 
at the Last Supper have been intelligible to them? The concep- 
tion of his person in the Synoptical Gospels is at bottom the same 
as in the fourth. In them he stands forth as the supreme law- 
giver, as we see in the Sermon on the Mount. He is distinguished 
from the prophets and exalted above them. He is at last to judge 
the world of mankind. The particular point that is found in John, 
in distinction from the other Gospels, is the explicit doctrine of his 
preexistence. It stands in a different connection from the doc- 
trine as it appears in the Epistle to the Hebrews. As to the opin- 
ion that the Evangelist " has simply put into the mouth of Jesus 
ideas learned from Paul," it is an unproved and unfounded con- 
clusion. " Such a method on the part of the author of the fourth 
Gospel would argue an indifference to historic truth which is by 
no means borne out by the character of the Gospel as a whole." ^ 
Among the Jews, in the later period of their history prior to the 
time of Jesus, many pseudonymous works were composed. This 
took place chiefly among the Alexandrians, but was not confined 
to them. 

Conscious that the age of inspiration had gone by, authors undertook 
to set forth, under the name of Enoch, Solomon, or some other worthy, 
the lessons which they thought suited to the times. They aspired to 
speak in the spirit of the prophet or sage whose name they assumed. 
In this literary device there was often no set purpose to deceive. The 
practice early passed, however, into a more culpable sort of forgery. It 
made its way into certain Christian circles where Judaic and Judaizing 
influences prevailed. The distinction between esoteric and exoteric 
doctrine, which may be traced to the Alexandrian philosophy, served 
as a partial excuse for it. Writings were fabricated like the Sibylline 
Oracles and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. But pious frauds of 
this nature, as every one feels, do violence to the sense of truth which 
Christianity demands and fosters. The Gospel brought in a purer 
standard. In the ancient Church, as now, books of this sort were 
earnestly condemned by enlightened Christians. Tertullian informs us 
that the presbyter who was convicted of writing, in the name of Paul, 
the Acta Pajili et T/teclcB, confessed his offence, and was deposed from 
ofiice. This incident shows the natural feeling of Christians generally 
in respect to this kind of benevolent imposture. The reader can judge 

1 McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 489. Dr. McGiffert proceeds to refute the 
opinion that " the Evangelist put into Jesus' mouth extended discourses which 
had no basis whatever in his actual words." 
X 



306 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

for himself what is the moral tone of the Johannean Gospel and Epistle. 
Did the author, in the point of sound ethical feeling, stand on the plane 
of the manufacturers of spurious books? Would such a man construct, 
under the mask of an apostle, a fictitious history of the Lord? Such a 
work, let it be noticed, is of a character utterly diverse from a purely 
homiletic writing. 

Both in ancient and modern times doubts have been enter- 
tained of the genuineness of the second Epistle of Peter. But 
if we can imagine a well-meaning Christian, with a conscience 
imperfectly trained, undertaking to compose a homily under the 
assumed name of an apostle, that is something utterly different 
from an attempt to build upon the ground, sacred as it must have 
been felt to be, that was already covered by the authentic Gospels. 
The irreverence of such a procedure eclipses any example fur- 
nished by the Gospels known to be apocryphal, which mainly con- 
fine themselves to the infancy of Jesus and to the Virgin Mary. 
Baur, defending his position, actually likens the author of this 
Gospel to the apostle Paul. Paul, he reminds us, was not one 
of the twelve. Why, he inquired, should there not be still another 
apostle? Think of the apostle Paul sitting down to compose a 
religious romance in the form of a history of the Lord Jesus Christ ! 
And yet the author of the fourth Gospel, in point of moral and 
spiritual worth, is put by Baur on a level with the apostle Paul. 

One of the most radical opponents of the Johannine authorship, 
at the same time that he sets its date not later than about lOO, 
frankly says that its writer " was perhaps the greatest Christian 
thinker in the Christendom of that time." ^ In the Christian 
literature of the second century, no book approaches in power 
the fourth Gospel. Everything is of an inferior quality. 

When we take up the writings of the sub-apostolic age, we are con- 
scious of an abrupt descent from the plane of the apostolic writings. 
The apostolic Fathers as a rule exhibit a languor which communicates 
itself to the reader. The epistle of Polycarp, although not wanting in 
good sense and good feeling, is not an exception. The epistle of 
Clement of Rome will not bear comparison with the New Testament 
writers. Unless with a view to scholarly investigation, who cares to 
linger over the allegories of Hermas? The anonymous epistle to 
Diognetus, the date of which is somewhere about the end of the second 
century, stands alone in that era as a really spirited composition. It 

1 Jiilicher, Introd. in d. N. T., p. 259. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 307 

is a discourse or appeal addressed to an individual ; but despite its 
rhetorical vigor, it cannot be compared for a moment in depth and 
power with the fourth Gospel. The writings of that day, those of 
Justin included, are comparatively faint echoes of the inspired works of 
the preceding age. 

How can a book of the transcendent power of the fourth Gospel 
be referred to a period of decadence? It has commanded the 
reverent sympathy of saints and scholars. It has touched the 
hearts of a multitude who with Martin Luther have felt it to be 
the chief Gospel, — the ^^ Hauptevangeliiwiy It has held its 
throne, age after age, in the households of the Christian nations, 
in every stage of culture and civilization. Such a product, 
springing up, like a flower of perennial beauty, in the barren 
waste of post-apostolic authorship, would be a veritable anach- 
ronism. 

The two ablest of the later critics ^ who withhold their assent to 
the tradition which certifies the apostolic authorship of the fourth 
Gospel, are nevertheless emphatic in declaring, what indeed is 
very plain, that the Gospel stands in a palpably close relation to 
the apostle John. Weizsacker doubts not that it was written " under 
the colors — unter dem Fahne — of the apostle," in the shadow of 
his repute and authority. The apostle, it is further said, as is indi- 
cated in ch. xxi. 23, lived to an advanced age, and it was only 
a short time after he died that the Gospel was written and given 
out. The author of the Gospel and the school to which he 
belonged might even make a claim to the name of the apostle, 
because he had belonged to their church and had been the head 
of it. Moreover, it is admitted that the doctrine of the Logos 
may have sprung up under his eyes and been approved by him, or 
at least not been opposed. The apostle was in truth the link of 
transition from the old faith to its form in the Gospel. Moreover, 
it is said that the characteristic features of personal devotion to 
Christ which pervade the Gospel are not the offspring of the Logos 
doctrine, but the outcome of a living experience. They could 
only emanate from the spirit of a disciple of Jesus. Nothing short 
of the testimony of an immediate apostle, his intuition of Christ, and 
the simplicity of his conception of faith can explain the taking up 
by one later of the Logos idea. What is depicted in the two parts 
^ Weizsacker and Harnack. 



308 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

of the Gospel, the first of which is the victorious might of Jesus 
over his enemies, and the second, his own attractive irresistible 
power, by which he drew his disciples to himself, constitutes the 
portraiture of a character which can proceed from no other than 
the soul of a disciple of Jesus himself, formed by it and filled with 
it. The school of discipleship in the bosom of which the Gospel 
appeared testifies to the powerful influence of the apostle John. 
To his influence both tendencies, finding their expression in the 
Apocalypse and in the Gospel, are due. So writes Weizsacker.-^ 
Who the Evangelist was he does not undertake to say. 

Harnack doubts not that John, the son of Zebedee, in some way 
" stands behind the fourth Gospel." To the apostle, to what he 
did and said, there are such references as to show conclusively 
that to him the Evangelist stood in a special relation. He wrote 
with aid from traditions obtained firom the apostle John, who, as 
the " disciple whom Jesus loved," stood, in the esteem of the 
EvangeUst, in the foreground of the company of disciples. Such, 
we are told, was the relation of "John the Presbyter" to the 
apostle. To the presbyter, and not to the apostle, Harnack, 
although not without frankly expressed misgivings, is inclined to 
attribute the composition of the Gospel. The function of 
" Apostle and Chief Bishop " of Asia he would transfer to John 
the Presbyter.^ 

So far as lapse of time is presupposed by the developed type of 
doctrine which appears in the Gospel, this condition is present in 
the case of the aged apostle himself, as in the case of either a 
group of his supposed disciples, or of any individual among them, 
to whom our critics think themselves obliged to ascribe its compo- 
sition. In this interval of thirty years, why may it not be in the 
loved disciple's own soul that the conception of Christ ripened 
into that deeper spiritual apprehension of his person and teaching 
which shines forth in the Gospel? It would be only the fulfilment 
of the prediction and promise attributed by its author to Christ. 
After he had parted from them, his teaching was to be revealed to 

^ See his Das Apostolisches Zeitalter, 2d ed., pp. 515, 517, 518, 519, 520, 
523, 526, 530, 532, 534, 537, 538. These ideas are brought forward and de- 
veloped at greater length, but with some differences, in Weizsacker's first 
principal work, Untersuchungen icber d. Evangelische Geschichte, Th. 2. See 
second edition of this work (1891). 

2 Die Chronologic d. Altchristl. Lit., vol. i pp. 677, 679. 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 309 

his disciples through the Spirit, its depth of meaning opened to 
their perception. *' He shall guide you into all truth." ^ Against 
the hypothesis that the authorship was non-apostolic stands the 
affirmation of the author that from the numerous signs wrought by 
Jesus, he had made a selection, and that his motive was that 
those for whom the Gospel was written might believe. Thus they 
would have the blessing, just before referred to, of such as not having 
seen, have yet beheved. Herewith belongs the positive testimony 
of the disciples of the apostle, at the end of the Gospel, that he 
himself wrote it. Had its author not been the apostle himself, it is 
unaccountable that his disciples, who survived him, should not have 
been aware of the fact, or should have deemed it unimportant, or 
not have let it be known. The hypothesis sketched above labors 
under another difficulty. One principal reason which is assigned 
for rejecting the apostohc authorship is features of the narrative 
which are supposed by critics on that side of the question to clash 
with the Synoptics or to be on some other ground incredible. An 
example is the record of the early acquaintance of John with 
Jesus through the mediation of John the Baptist. But how can 
we ascribe these passages to disciples of the apostle John ? If 
they did not get these details from him, did they make them up ? 
Since the isolated objection of the " Alogi," in the shape in which 
it was made, confirms the otherwise unbroken tradition, that tradi- 
tion is virtually universal. It is incredible that Irenaeus mistook 
the meaning and was ignorant of the belief of Polycarp and of 
other older contemporaries on a matter so profound and so 
interesting to him and to them. 

The decision relative to the authorship of the fourth Gospel lies 
between two hypotheses. The one recognizes the apostle John 
himself as its author. The other attributes the Gospel to a disciple 
of the apostle, by whom matter resting directly or indirectly on his 
authority was combined with materials derived from other sources. 
To the present writer, the hypothesis which identifies the Evange- 
list with the apostle appears entitled to acceptance, as exposed to 
less weighty objections, besides being supported by the concurrent 
testimonies of Christian antiquity. 

1 John xvi. 14, xiv. 26, xv. 26. Cf. Loofs, /. ^., p. 35. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY A3 PRESENTED 

BY THE EVANGELISTS 

In the last two chapters evidence has been brought forward to 
prove that the Gospels were written by apostles and companions 
of apostles ; in particular, that the fourth Gospel is rightly attrib- 
uted to John ; that the first Gospel, at least in its original form, 
and as to the main portion of its contents, had Matthew for its 
author, and that it existed in the Greek, and in its present com- 
pass, while the generation of the first disciples of Jesus, by whom 
it was acknowledged, was still in being ; that the second and third 
Gospels were composed by contemporaries who brought together 
the information which they had sought and obtained from apostles, 
and from others who were immediately cognizant of the facts. 
The Gospels thus meet one test of trustworthy historical evidence, 
— that it shall come from witnesses or well-informed contempo- 
raries. They present the information which the apostles gave to 
their converts respecting the words and actions of Jesus. We have 
to specify reasons why this testimony is entitled to credit. Let it 
be understood that in this place we have nothing to do with the 
theological doctrine of inspiration, or with the nature and limits of 
divine help afforded to the historical writers of the New Testament 
in the composition of their books. That subject is irrelevant to the 
present discussion. What we have to establish is the essential 
credibility of the Evangelists; in other words, to show that the 
narrative which they give of the life of Jesus may be relied on 
as safely as we rely on the biographical accounts of other eminent 
personages in the past which are known to have been composed 
by honest and, in other respects, competent narrators. 

I. The fact of the selection of the apostles, and the view delib- 
erately taken both by Jesus and by themselves of their function, 
are a strong argument for their credibihty. 

In inquiring whether the Gospel history is true or not, it is, first 
of all, important to ascertain what view Jesus took of the life he 

310 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY 311 

was leading among men, and also to observe in what light his 
career was regarded by his followers. Had his teaching, and the 
events occurring in connection with his life, such a significance in 
his own eyes, that he meant them to be the subject of testimony? 
Did he design that they should be remembered, and be faithfully 
narrated to those beyond the circle of immediate observers? In 
other words, had he, and his followers with him, an '' historical 
feeling " as regards the momentous occurrences, as they proved 
to be, belonging to his career? This question is conclusively an- 
swered by the fact of a deliberate selection by him of a body of 
persons to be with him, who were deputed to relate what they saw 
and heard, and who distinctly understood this to be an essential 
part of their business. They were called " the Twelve " ; and so 
current was this appellation at an early day, that Paul thus desig- 
nates them even in referring to the time when Judas had fallen 
out of their number (i Cor. xv. 5). The idea which they had of 
their office was explicitly pointed out by Peter when he stated the 
qualifications of the one who should be chosen in place of Judas 
(Acts i. 21-25). It may be remarked, before quoting the passage, 
that, even if there were any just ground for suspecting the accuracy 
of Luke in general, it could have no application in this place. 
For instance, there is no room for the bias of a Pauline disciple, 
since the transaction is one in which it is Peter who appears as 
the leader; and the thing proposed is the completion of the num- 
ber of " the Twelve." The passage reads as follows, " Where- 
fore of these men which have companied with us " — that is, 
travelled about with us — " all the time that the Lord Jesus went 
in and out among us," — that is, was in constant intercourse with 
us, — "beginning from the baptism of John unto that same day 
that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a wit- 
ness with us of his resurrection." The resurrection is particularly 
mentioned as the fact most prominent in the apostle's testimony. 
Here is a deliberate consciousness on the part of Peter, that he 
and his fellow-apostles were clothed with the responsibility of wit- 
nesses, and that, to be of their number, one must have the neces- 
sary qualification of a credible witness, — a personal knowledge 
of that about which he is to testify. "We are witnesses," said 
Peter, on a subsequent occasion, " of all things which he did both 
in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem " (Acts x. 39).^ Their 
1 Cf. Luke xxiv. 47-49 ; Acts i. 8. 



312 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

commission was to "teach all nations," and to teach them the 
commandments of Jesus (Matt, xxviii. 20). His teaching was to 
be brought to their remembrance (John xiv. 26). They were 
forewarned that they would be arraigned before magistrates, to give 
reasons for their adherence to him (Matt. x. 18; Luke xxi. 12). 
The promise of the Spirit is given in a form to exalt, and not to 
diminish, the importance of the historical facts of the life and 
teaching of Jesus (John xiv. 15 seq., 25, 26, xv. 24-27, xvi. 14; 
Luke xxi. 14, 15). The apostle John speaks of himself as an 
eye-witness (John i. 14, xix. 35, cf. xxi. 24). Luke, at the begin- 
ning of his Gospel, refers to his having consulted, with painstaking, 
those who had heard and witnessed the things to be recorded by 
him (Luke i. 1-5). His object in writing is to satisfy Theophilus, 
one in whom he was specially interested, that his Christian behef 
rested on a good foundation of evidence. It is plain that the 
apostles and Evangelists are distinctly conscious of their position. 
They are aware that they have to fulfil the duty of witnesses. 
There is this barrier against fancy and delusion. It is a great point 
in favor of their credibihty. 

2. The apostles never ceased to be conscious that they were 
disciples. They never ceased to look back upon the words and 
actions of Christ with the profoundest interest, and to regard them 
as a sacred treasure left in their hands to be communicated to an 
ever widening circle. In that life as it had actually passed before 
their eyes, they placed the foundation of all their hope and of the 
hope of the world. There is not the least sign that any enthusiasm 
which they felt in their work ever carried them away from this 
historical anchorage. The precious legacy which they received 
it devolved on them to convey to others in a spirit of sobriety 
and conscientiousness, and with such a sense of its value and 
sacredness, that they were cut off from the temptation to add to it 
or subtract from it. They wens as far as possible from regarding 
what they had received as a mere starting-point for them to con- 
found with it speculations of their own. They were not " many 
masters," but continued to hold to the end the reverent, depend- 
ent position of learners. 

3. The apostles relate, without the least attempt at apology or 
concealment, instances of ignorance and weakness on their part, 
together with the reproofs on this account which they received 
from the Master. 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY 313 

This proves their honesty ; but, more than that, it ilhistrates 
the objective character of their testimony. That they were taken 
up by the matter itself, so that all personal considerations sank out 
of sight, is the main fact which we are now endeavoring to illus- 
trate. So absorbing is their interest in what actually occurred, 
that they do not heed its effect on their own reputation. They do 
not think of themselves. What exhibits them in an unfavorable 
light they narrate with as much artless simplicity as if they were not 
personally affected by it. When Jesus taught them that no defile- 
ment could be contracted by eating one rather than another kind 
of food, at which the Pharisees were offended, Peter asked him to 
explain " the parable," or obscure saying. They tell us (Matt. xv. 
16; Mark vii. 18) that Jesus answered, "Are ye also yet without 
understanding?" He expressed, they say, astonishment and 
regret that even they could not divine his meaning. When told to 
beware of " the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees," they 
obtusely surmised that the injunction had reference to a possible 
deficiency of bread. They report the severe reproach, which this 
called forth, of a littleness of faith, a failure to remember the mira- 
cle of the loaves (Matt. xvi. 8 ; Mark viii. 17-21).^ They tell us 
how they confessed their own weakness of faith (Luke xvii. 5). 
Repeatedly they state that they did not comprehend or take in 
the predictions of his suffering death, which were addressed to 
them by Jesus. They represent themselves to have clung so tena- 
ciously to the idea of a political Messiah, that after the death of 
Jesus they expressed their disappointment in the words, "We 
trusted that it should have been he which should have redeemed 
Israel." And, even after the resurrection, they anxiously required 
of him, " Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to 
Israel ? " This false conception of the Messiah's work led to 
expressions on their part which deeply wounded Jesus. These 
are faithfully reported by them. They inform us (Matt. xvi. 23 ; 
cf. Mark viii. ^iZ \ Luke iv. 8) that Peter's protest against the 
suggestion that Jesus was to suffer death elicited from him such a 
rebuke as nothing but the feeling that he was tempted to sin by a 

1 The strong expression of grief and weariness, " O faithless and perverse 
generation! " etc. (Matt. xvii. 17), is omitted above, for the reason that the 
parallel (Mark ix. 19) makes it, perhaps, doubtful whether the disciples were 
included among those addressed in the apostrophe. Matt. xvii. 20 would 
suggest that they were. 



314 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

friend by whom he ought rather to be supported on the hard path 
of duty, could evoke, "Get thee behind me, Satan," — adversary 
of the will of God, tempter, — "for thou art an offence" — a 
stumbling-block — " unto me ; for thou savorest not " — mindest 
not — "the things that be of God," — God's will, God's cause, — 
" but those that be of men." This heavy, humiliating rebuke is 
recorded by all the Synoptists. It entered into the story which 
the apostles, Peter included, were accustomed to relate. Other 
instances when they must have felt humbled by the Saviour's dis- 
pleasure are recorded with the same candor. For example, when 
they repelled those who brought little children to him, Jesus " was 
much displeased," and bade them let the children come to him 
(Mark x. 13, 14 ; cf. Matt. xix. 14 ; Luke xviii. 16). 

What surer mark of an honest narrator can exist than a willing- 
ness to give a plain, unvarnished account of his own mortifying 
mistakes, and the consequent rebuffs, whether just or not, which 
he has experienced ? When Boswell writes that Johnson said to 
him, with a stern look, "Sir, I have known David Garrick longer 
than you have done, and I know no right you have to talk to me 
on the subject," or when an author tells us that his hero said to 
him, " Sir, endeavor to clear your mind of cant," no one can 
doubt that the biographer is telHng a true story. Men are not 
hkely to invent anecdotes to their own discredit. When we find 
them in any author, a strong presumption is raised in favor of his 
general truthfulness. 

4. The apostles related, and the Evangelists record, serious 
delinquencies of which the former were guilty, — unworthy tempers 
of feeling, and offences of a grave character. 

They tell us of the ambition and rivalry which sprang up among 
them, and of the wrangles that ensued. The mother of John and 
James petitioned that her sons might have the highest places of 
honor in the new kingdom, of the nature of which she had so poor 
a conception (Matt. xx. 20, 21). The two apostles joined in the 
request (Mark x. 37), having first tried to draw from their Master 
a promise that they should have whatever they might ask for. 
The other ten were angry with John and James for preferring such a 
request (Mark x. 41). One day, on their way to Capernaum, the 
disciples fell into a dispute on the same question, — who shall 
have the precedence (Mark ix. 34; cf Luke ix. 46, xxii. 24). 
Altercations of this sort, so they themselves related, broke out in 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY 31 5 

their company on different occasions. Will the reader ponder the 
fact that all four of the Evangelists give a circumstantial account 
of the denials of Peter? (Matt. xxvi. 58 seq.; Mark xiv. 54 seq.; 
Luke xxii. 54 seq.; John xviii. 15 seq.) Here was the apostle who 
had a kind of leadership among them. It was he whose preaching 
was most effective among the Jews everywhere (Gal. ii. 8) . Yet this 
undisguised account of his cowardice, treachery, and falsehood, on 
a most critical occasion, is presented in detail in the evangelical 
narrative. It is impossible to doubt that it formed a part of the 
story of the crucifixion, which the apostles, each and all of them, 
told to their converts. Could a more striking proof of simple 
candor be afforded ? Is it not obvious that the narrators sank 
their own personality — merged it as it were — in the absorbing 
interest with which they looked back on the scenes which they 
had beheld, and in which they had taken part? And then they 
relate that at the crucifixion they all forsook Jesus, and fled (Matt, 
xxvi. 56; Mark xiv. 50). They make no attempt to conceal the 
fact that they left his burial to be performed by one who was com- 
paratively a stranger, and by the women whose devotion overcame 
their terror, or who considered that their sex would be their safe- 
guard. Beyond the conscientious spirit which this portrayal of 
their own infirmities and misconduct compels us to attribute to 
the apostles, these features of the Gospel narrative show that they 
forgot themselves, so intent were they on depicting things just as 
they had occurred. In other words, they impress on us the objec- 
tive character of the Gospel history as it is given on the pages of 
the Evangelists. 

5. It is an impressive indication of the objective character of the 
apostolic narrative, that the manifestations of human infirmity in 
Jesus, infirmity which does not involve sin, are referred to in the 
plainest manner, and without the least apology or concealment. 
These passages occur side by side with the accounts of miracles. 
Had there been a conscious or latent disposition to glorify their 
Master at the expense of truth, it is scarcely possible that they 
would have spread out these illustrations of human weakness. It 
is only necessary to remind the reader of the record of the agony 
of Jesus in the garden. We are informed that he was overwhelmed 
with mental distress. He sought the close companionship of the 
three disciples who were most intimate with him. He prostrated 
himself on the earth in supphcation to God. As he lay on the 



3l6 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

ground, one of the Evangelists tells us — if we adopt the accepted 
reading — that the sweat fell from his body, either actually mingled 
with blood, or in drops like drops of blood issuing from the wounds 
of a fallen soldier. " My soul " — thus he had spoken to the three 
disciples — " is exceeding sorrowful unto death." In the presence 
of passages like these, how can it be thought that the apostles were 
enthusiasts, oblivious or careless of facts, and bent on presenting 
an ideal of their own devising, rather than the life of Jesus just as 
they had seen it?^ 

6. The truthfulness of the apostles is proved by their submis- 
sion to extreme suffering and to death for the testimony which 
they gave. 

They had nothing to gain, from an earthly point of view, by re- 
lating the history which is recorded in the Gospels : on the con- 
trary, they had everything to lose. It had been distinctly foretold 
to them that they would be " delivered up to be afflicted," deliv- 
ered up to pain and distress, be objects of universal hatred, and be 
killed (Matt. xxiv. 9). They were forewarned that they would be 
seized, imprisoned, brought before rulers as criminals, betrayed 
by friends and nearest relatives (Luke xxi. 12-16; cf. xi. 49). 
" The time cometh," it was said, " that whosoever killeth you will 
think that he doeth God service " (John xvi. 2 ; cf. xv. 20, xvi. 33). 
These predictions were verified in their experience. Whatever 
view is taken of the authorship of the Gospels, none can doubt 
that these passages are a picture of what the apostles really en- 
dured. The persecution of the apostles was the natural result of 
the spirit which had prompted the crucifixion of Jesus. It began 
as soon as they began publicly to preach " Jesus and the resurrec- 
tion." There were men, like Saul of Tarsus, eager to hunt down 
the heretics. The murder of Stephen occurred in the year 33 or 
34, about two years after the death of Christ. The apostles were 
objects of mingled scorn and wrath. Their situation is described 
by St. Paul as follows : " For I think that God hath set forth us 
the apostles last, as it were appointed to death " — or doomed to 
death, — " for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to 
angels, and to men. . . . Even unto this present hour we both 
hunger and thirst, and are naked and are buffeted, and have no 

1 It does not fall within the plan of John to repeat this narrative of the 
Synoptists. But John reports an instance of the deep distress of Jesus, " Now 
is my soul troubled," etc. (xii. 27). John alone relates that he " wept " (xi. 35). 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY 317 

certain dwelling-place. . . . Being reviled, we bless ; being per- 
secuted, we suffer it ; being defamed, we entreat ; we are made 
as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto 
this day" (i Cor. iv. 9-14). There were certain peculiar expos- 
ures to suffering in the case of Paul, yet he describes here the 
common lot of the apostles. Defamation, pubhc scorn, physical 
hardship, assaults by mobs, and punishments by the civil authority, 
imprisonment, death, — this was what they saw before them, and 
what they actually suffered. Ostracism, with all the indignities and 
pains that bitter fanaticism can inflict along with it, was the re- 
ward which they had to expect for their testimony to the teach- 
ing, the miracles, the resurrection, following the death, of Jesus. 
To suspect them of dishonesty is to imagine that men will fling away 
property, friends, home, country, and life itself, for the sake of 
telling a falsehood that is to bring them no sort of advantage. 

Hardly less irrational is it to charge them with self-delusion. 
It has been shown in a preceding chapter, by internal evidence 
derived from the Gospels, and by other proofs, that miracles were 
wrought by Christ. It has been shown that the theory of halluci- 
nation will not avail to explain the unanimous, immovable belief of 
the apostles in his resurrection. These men attended Jesus through 
his public ministry, from the beginning to the close. The occur- 
rences which necessarily presupposed the exertion of miraculous 
power took place in their presence. They were events in which 
they had a deep concern. The apostles, to be sure, were not 
inquisitive naturalists, but they were not wanting in common sense, 
and they were conscientious men. They were the men whom 
Jesus Christ selected to be his companions. Unless, as the enemies 
of Jesus charged, he was " a deceiver," and most accomplished 
in the art, how could they mistake the character of these works 
which, as they alleged, he performed before their eyes? 

But as the miracles are the part of the Gospel history which in 
these days chiefly provokes incredulity, it is well, once more, 
briefly to advert to this topic. No more time need be spent on 
Hume's argument to show that a miracle is, under no circumstances, 
capable of being proved. As Mill observes, all that Hume has 
made out is, that no evidence can prove a miracle to an atheist, 
or to a deist who supposes himself able to prove that God would 
not interfere to produce the miraculous event in question.^ We 
^ J. S. Mill, System of Logic y vol. ii. p. no. 



3l8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

assume the being and moral attributes of God ; and we need not fur- 
ther discuss the character, in other respects, of Hume's reasoning.^ 
As the miracles rest on the same grounds of evidence as the 
other matters of fact to which the apostles testify, special reasons 
are required for discrediting their testimony as regards this one 
class of events. Is it said, " granting that they are possible, they are 
incredible "? The answer is, that, being a necessary element and 
the natural adjuncts of revelation, they are not incredible, unless 
the fact of revelation, and of Christian revelation in particular, is 
incredible. Their improbability is just as great as, and no greater 
than, the improbability that God would reveal himself to men, and 
send his Son to save them. Is it objected that there has been a 
vast number of pretended miracles ? The answer of Bishop Butler 
appears sufficient, that mankind have not been oftener deluded by 
these pretences than by others. " Prejudices almost without num- 
ber and without name, romance, affectation, humor, a desire to 
engage attention or to surprise, the party-spirit, custom, little com- 
petitions, unaccountable likings and dislikings — these influence 
men strongly in common matters." As they are not reflected on by 
those in whom they operate, their efl'ect is like that of enthusiasm. 
And yet, as Butler adds, human testimony in common matters is 
not, on this account, discredited. Because some narratives of 
miracles spring out of mere enthusiasm, it is an unwarrantable in- 
ference that all are to be accounted for in this way.^ 

1 See above, ch. iv. On Pagan and Ecclesiastical Miracles, see Appendix, 
Note, p. 421. 

2 What is said in the Gospels of Jesus prior to his public ministry calls for 
special remark. Of this portion of his life, the apostles were not directly 
cognizant. With regard to it they were dependent upon others for informa- 
tion. The brief and fragmentary character of the introductory narratives in 
Matthew and Luke is adapted to inspire confidence, rather than distrust, since 
it indicates authentic tradition as the probable source of them. The most 
important fact contained in them is the miraculous conception. For the 
historical truth of this record, there is proof in the circumstance that Matthew's 
and Luke's narratives are from separate sources, and are complementary to 
each other. Moreover, these sources are Jewish. Certainly Luke's account is 
from a Jewish Christian document. There was nothing in Jewish ideas to lead 
to the origination of a myth of this sort. As for Judaizing Christians, they 
would be the last to imagine an incident so contrary to their dogmatic ten- 
dencies. As to Isa. vii. 14, there is no proof that it had been applied by the 
Jews to the Messiah; and the Hebrew term used there did not necessarily 
denote an unmarried person, Luke repeatedly refers to the recollections of 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY 319 

We are not called upon to confute the opinion that the first 
three Gospels — the historical character of the fourth has already 
been vindicated — were moulded by a doctrinal purpose or bias, 
since that opinion finds no countenance now from judicious critics 
of whatever theological creed. The first Gospel contains numer- 
ous passages in which the catholic character of Christianity is 
emphatically set forth.^ " Our Matthew," says Mangold, an un- 
prejudiced critic, not at all wedded to traditional views, " is, to be 
sure, written by a Jewish Christian for Jewish Christians" ; " but 
he has given us no writing with a Jewish Christian doctrinal bias." 
" The words of Jesus quoted in Matthew," says Reuss, *' which 
form the doctrinal kernel of the book, are not selected in the 
slightest degree from that point of view," — that of the Palestinian 
Jewish Christianity, — " but go beyond it in a hundred places, and 
bespeak so much the more the faithfulness of the tradition."^ 
Mark has decidedly outgrown Judaism ; " but no dogmatic ten- 
Mary respecting the early days of Jesus (Luke ii. 19, 51), It is probable that 
she lived at Jerusalem with John. " She kept in her heart " all the sayings 
[or things] connected with Jesus when he was twelve years old (Luke ii. 51). 
It is not strange if a knowledge of the circumstances concerning his birth was 
slow in reaching the ears of his followers, or that early genealogies should 
assume Joseph to have been his father. That John and Paul do not connect the 
Saviour's divinity, or even his sinlessness, with his miraculous birth, goes to 
prove that doctrinal belief did not engender the story. Luke's designation of 
Jesus as holy, in connection with his miraculous conception (Luke i. 35; cf. 
Matt, i, 20), is not equivalent to sinlessness. If the origination of such a 
myth could be credited to Gentile Christians, which, especially at so early a 
date, is an unlikely supposition, we could not account for its adoption in the 
circle of Palestinian Jewish Christians. How the idea of a miraculous ele- 
ment in the birth of " the second Adam " comports with the function that was 
to belong to him as a new creative potence in humanity, together with the 
force of the historical proofs, is cogently presented by Neander, Leben Jesu, 
pp. 14 seq. See also the instructive discussion of Weiss, Leben Jesu, i. 212 
seq. That difficulties should exist in connection with details in the narra- 
tives of the opening period of Christ's life, which are collected in Matthew 
and Luke, is to be expected. It is natural that Strauss should make the most 
of them. The subject of the miraculous birth is fairly and instructively 
handled by Sanday, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, i. 642 seq. For 
valuable remarks of Professor Ramsay on this topic, see his Was Christ born 
in Bethlehem ? 

1 Matt. viii. 11, ix. 16 seq., xii. 8, xiii. 31, xx. I seq., xxi. 28, 33, xxii. 40, 
xxiii. 33, xxiv. 14, xxviii. 19; cf. Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Chris- 
tianity, pp. 213-215; Reuss, Gesch. d. heilig. Schriftt. d. N. T., p. 195. 

2 Gesch., etc., p. 194. 



320 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

dency can on this account be saddled on his presentation of the 
Gospel history, as long as it is not shown that Christ himself did 
not rise above Judaism, and that the Jewish Christian Matthew 
looks on Christianity as a development within the limits of Juda- 
ism." ^ In Luke, '' not only does the history of Jesus acquire in 
general no other significance than in Matthew, nowhere is there 
disclosed a design to set aside or to overcome an imperfect under- 
standing of it : on the contrary, there occur numerous words and 
acts, drawn from the general tradition, which, when literally taken, 
rather wear a Jewish Christian coloring. But here it will be 
nearest to the truth to affirm that not a party feeling, but the most 
independent historical research, — or, if we prefer so to call it, a 
thirst for the fullest possible information, — has governed in the 
collection of the matter."^ The whole charge of being Tendenz- 
Schriften, which Baur and his school brought against the Gospels, 
is founded on untenable theories respecting their authorship and 
order of composition. 

If the "tendency-theory" no longer calls for detailed refutation, 
the same thing is true of the attack of Strauss on the credibility of 
the Gospels, which is founded on their alleged inconsistencies. 
This attack is now acknowledged by judicious scholars to be 
merely the work of an expert advocate, bent on finding contradic- 
tions in testimony which he is anxious to break down.^ The 
Gospel narratives are wholly inartificial. No compositions could 
be more open to assault from critics who ignore this character that 
belongs to them, and labor to magnify the importance of varia- 
tions which serve to prove that there was no collusion among 
the several writers, and no attempt on the part of anybody to frame 
a story that should be proof against hostile comment.'* 

Over and above particular evidences of trustworthiness, such as 
have just been stated, there is one token even more impressive 
than single items of this nature, a token which the unlearned 
reader of the Gospels must feel to be convincing. It is the por- 
traiture of the character of Jesus which the Evangelists present 

1 Mangold-Bleek, Einl. in d. N. T., p. 342. 

2 Reuss, p, 212. 

3 A full reply to Strauss on this topic is made in the present writer's The 
Supernatural Origin of Christianity, ch. vi. 

* For remarks on discrepancies in the Gospels, see Appendix, Note 000. 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE APOSTLES' TESTIMONY 32 1 

alike before the eyes of the simple and the cultured. We see in a 
concrete form an ideal which these writers could never have them- 
selves originated. Composed of numerous disconnected elements, 
it stands forth a consistent, living picture which has called forth 
the homage and moved the hearts of succeeding generations. 
This image of Jesus presented in artless narrations demonstrates 
their verity. Of the Galilean fishermen and their humble associ- 
ates it has been said by a teacher trained in letters and philosophy 
that, " if it be an unreal creation of their own, we will worship 
them." 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE AND TO 

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

The critical discussions which are rife in our times respecting 
the Bible, the authorship of its various* books, and the historical 
value and normal authority of their contents make it important 
to consider the bearing of these inquiries and debates on the 
Christian faith. What is the relation of the collection of writings 
which we call the Bible to the religion of Christ? How far is a 
particular doctrine on the subject of the Scriptures requisite for a 
theoretical or a practical reception of the Gospel in its just import 
and proper efficacy? Do the verdicts of critical science imperil, or 
are they likely to imperil, the foundations on which Christianity, 
considered as an experience of the soul, or as a body of beliefs 
concerning God and man, the hfe that now is, and the world 
hereafter, reposes? 

So much is clear at the outset, that what we know of the his- 
torical and doctrinal parts of Christianity is ascertained almost 
exclusively from the Bible. The same is true of our knowledge of 
the origin and growth of that entire religious system which is con- 
summated in the work and teaching of Christ and of the apostles. 
It is not less plain that the nutriment of Christian piety is derived 
chiefly from the pages of Sacred Scripture. The instrumentalities 
of human teaching, the activities of the Church in building up 
Christian character, and the rest of the manifold agencies through 
which the power of religion is kept ahve in the individual and in 
society, draw their vitality from the Bible. The habit of resorting 
to the Bible for spiritual quickening and direction is the indispen- 
sable condition of religious Hfe among Christians. The practical 
proof of the inspiration of Holy Scripture — the preeminence of 
this volume above all other books known to men — is found in 
this hfe-giving power that abides in it, and remains undiminished, 
from age to age, in all the mutations of literature, and amid the 

322 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 323 

diverse types and advancing stages of culture and civilization. The 
general proposition, that the Bible is at once the fountain of spir- 
itual light and life, the prime source of religious knowledge, and the 
rule of faith and guide of conduct among Christians, admits of no 
contradiction. 

But this general theorem does not cut off those special prob- 
lems and distinctions which, with a view to exact definition and 
qualification, constitute biblical criticism, as that branch of study 
is at present understood. It could not be that the traditional views 
which were handed down from the Church of the fourth century, 
through the middle ages, uncritical to some extent as those views 
were in their inception, should escape the scrutiny of a more search- 
ing and scientific era. The Renaissance awakened a fresh intel- 
lectual life and an inquisitive spirit. The hberty of thought which 
the Reformation brought in was attended at the outset with a more 
discriminating and a more free handling of questions pertaining 
to the origin and character of the books of Scripture, as the exam- 
ple of Luther notably illustrates. The separation of the Old Tes- 
tament apocrypha from the Scriptural canon was one consequence 
of this more bold and enlightened spirit of inquiry. The exigen- 
cies of controversy with the Roman Catholics begot among Prot- 
estant teachers of dogmatic theology, in the next age, a more 
scrupulously conservative method of shaping the doctrine respect- 
ing the inspiration of bibHcal books than a number of great leaders 
in the Protestant movement had adopted. The authority of the 
Bible, in opposition to the Tridentine principle of church authority, 
was so construed as to lay fetters upon the critical spirit among the 
Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century. The maxim 
of Chillingworth, himself a theological writer of a liberal cast, 
"The Bible is the religion of Protestants," was the parent gener- 
ally of the dogma that the Scriptures are in all respects impeccable. 
More and more the rise and spread of the scientific spirit — the 
spirit which pursues truth alone as its goal, casting aside every 
bias as tending to blind the eye, and sifting evidence with an un- 
sparing rigor — could not fail to affect this department of knowledge. 
More and more the spirit of candid and exhaustive and fearless 
investigation, which is the legitimate child of the Protestant move- 
ment, insisted upon testing the prevalent impressions concerning 
the Bible and its various parts, by the strict rules that govern im- 
partial investigation in every other province. Literary criticism, 



324 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

which concerns itself with the correctness of the received text and 
with the authorship and date of the several books, with their real 
or alleged discrepancies ; natural and physical science, exploring 
the origin of the earth and of its inhabitants, and of the stellar 
spheres above ; historical and archaeological study, exhuming relics 
of the past, and deciphering monuments of bygone ages, ■ — these 
branches of knowledge bring, each of them, conclusions of its own 
to be placed in juxtaposition and comparison with the Hebrew and 
Christian Scriptures. Biblical criticism was something inevitable. 
It sprang up within the pale of the Church. Its most valuable 
contributions have been made by Christian scholars. It is true 
that disbelievers in the divine mission of Jesus, and even in the 
supernatural altogether, have sometimes devoted themselves to 
these inquiries. It is a blunder and an injustice, however, on the 
part of Christians, and a false boast on the part of their adversa- 
ries, when on either side it is affirmed that biblical criticism, and 
the verified results of it, are principally due to efforts of scholars 
without sympathy with the Church and with the cause of religion. 

Enough has been said respecting the exalted function of Scrip- 
ture to preclude misapprehension when we proceed to remark 
that the Bible is one thing and Christianity is another. The reli- 
gion of Christ, in the right signification of these terms, is not to be 
confounded with the scriptures, even of the New Testament. The 
point of view from which the Bible, as related to Christianity, is 
looked on as the Koran appears to devout Mohammedans, is a 
mistaken one. The entire conception according to which the 
energies of the Divine Being, as exerted in the Christian revela- 
tion, are thought to have been concentrated on the production of 
a book, is a misconception, and one that is prolific of error. 

I. The revelation of God which culminates in the Gospel, so 
far from being a naked communication let down from the skies, is 
in and through a process of redemption. Redemption is an effect 
wrought in the souls of men and in human society. Christianity 
is a new spiritual creation in humanity. The product is "new 
creatures in Christ Jesus," — amoral transformation of mankind. 
Jesus said to his disciples, " Ye are the light of the world ... ye 
are the salt of the earth." From them was to go forth an illumi- 
nating, renovating power. Seeing their good works, attracted by 
their spirit, other men were to be brought to the Father. The 
brotherhood of Christian believers was the dwelling-place in which 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 325 

the living God made his abode : they were his " house," as the 
temple was his house under the former dispensation.^ They are 
expressly declared to be the " temple " of God, in which his 
Spirit abides.^ The "pillar and ground of truth" — that which 
upholds the truth in the world, and is like a foundation underneath 
it — is the Church. It is not said to be books which had been 
written, or which were to be written, but the community of faith- 
ful souls.^ A society had been brought into being, — a people of 
God, with an open eye to discern spiritual things. A vine-stock 
had been planted, the branches of which, if they did not dissever 
themselves, would bear fruit. 

2. Revelation is historical : the means of revelation are primarily 
the dealings of God with men. The revelation of God to the 
Hebrew people was made through the providential guidance and 
government which determined the course of their history. When 
the sacred writers — as the authors of the Psalms, or inspired 
orators like the protomartyr Stephen — speak of divine revelation, 
they recount the ways in which God in the past has led his people. 
The appeal is to the disclosure of God in the providential history of 
his people. Especially do they recall the manifestation of God 
in the deliverance from bondage in Egypt by the hand of Moses, 
in the leading of Israel through the wilderness, in the conquest of 
the land which they inhabited, in the various instances of national 
prosperity and national disaster which followed. Events had been 
so ordered, signal rewards had been seen so to alternate with sig- 
nal chastisements, that God was more and more brought home to 
their minds and hearts in his true character. The nations 
generally valued their divinities for the protection and help which 
they afforded. This was the ordinary heathen view. Under 
the divine training of the Israelites, they rose to a higher 
and altogether different conception. So established did their 
faith become that national downfall, and what seemed utter ruin, 
did not signify that Jehovah was powerless. These calamities 
were the chastisement inflicted on them by God himself. It was 
not that God was overcome by stronger powers ; it was he him- 
self who had brought on them defeat and exile, and the desola- 
tion of their altars and homes. Hence they were moved to 
cling to him all the closer. They were saved from complete 

^Heb. iii. 2, 5, x. 21; i Pet. iv. 17, cf. Ephes. ii. 22. 
2 I Cor. iii. 16; 2 Cor. vi. 16. * i Tim. iii. 15. 



326 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

despair. They could believe that God might not have utterly 
forsaken them. They ascended to a higher point of view. They 
learned to contemplate God both as holy, as actuated by ethical 
motives in his government, as just to punish, and merciful to spare 
and to forgive the contrite, and as the Ruler, not of themselves 
alone, but of the whole earth. The thread of his all-governing 
purpose and will ran, not through the history of Israel alone, but 
through the fate and fortunes of all nations. By experiences of 
actual life under the providential sway of God, their knowledge of 
him expanded, their communion with him became more intimate 
and more intelhgent. A father discloses himself to his children by 
his management of them from day to day and from year to year. 
His smile rewards them. He frowns upon them when they go 
astray. They are trained to confide in him. They know him 
more and more as they live under his care, and witness the mani- 
festation of his qualities in the successive periods of their lives. 
The didactic element is not wanting. The father teaches, as well 
as guides and governs. Explanation, admonition, — it may be, 
outpourings of grief and affection, — are intermingled with the 
instruction contained in act and deed. His dealings with them 
are not left to be misinterpreted. Their purport is made clear, if 
need be, by verbal elucidation. They are intermingled with coun- 
sel and command. Somewhat after this manner, in the course of 
the history of Israel, "the servant" of the Lord, not only were 
heroes raised up providentially to lead armies, and administer 
civil affairs, but holy men were called upon the stage to make 
known the meaning of the doings of God, to point the presumptu- 
ous and the desponding to the future, to give voice to the spirit 
of prayer and praise which the character of God, and his rela- 
tion to them, should appropriately inspire. Prophets, with vision 
clarified by light shining into their souls from above, expounded 
the providential deahngs of God, read aloud his purposes discovered 
in them, commanded, warned, and consoled in his name. 

If we turn to the revelation of God in the Gospel, we observe 
the same method. It is an historical manifestation. A child is 
born at Bethlehem, and brought up at Nazareth, consecrated 
by baptism in the Jordan, collects about him a company of chosen 
followers, lives in intercourse with men, performs miracles of heal- 
ing and deliverance, dies, and reappears from the tomb. He 
teaches ; and his teaching is indispensable to the effect to be pro- 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 327 

duced, and is most precious. But his own person and character, 
his deeds of power and mercy, his voluntary submission to death, 
his resurrection, ascension, and continued agency through the 
Spirit, — it is in these facts and transactions that the Gospel cen- 
tres. They are the material, the vehicle, of revelation. The 
didactic element is to open the eye to their intrinsic significance. 
It is to insure against misunderstanding, and to impress on the 
hearts and minds of men the inherent meaning of these deeds of 
God in human history. 

3. The persons and transactions through which revelation is 
made, one must remember, are anterior to the Scriptures that 
relate to them. The apostle Paul traces back the line of God's 
people to the faith of their nomadic ancestor. This faith pre- 
ceded, of course, every record of it, and everything that was writ- 
ten about it. There could be no story of divine judgments and 
deliverances, and of their effect on the religious consciousness of 
the people, prior to the occurrences in question and to the obser- 
vation of their result. As fast as sacred literature arose, its influ- 
ence would be more or less felt ; but this literature presupposed 
and rested on a progressive religious life and on the historical 
forces which fostered as well as originated it. The great fact of 
the old dispensation, its palpable outcome, was a people imbued 
with the spirit of a pure theism, separated from the heathen 
world by the possession of an exalted faith in God, and of a great 
hope of redemption inseparably conjoined with it — a people 
bearing witness to God in the midst of the pagan world. In 
like manner the Church of the new covenant preceded the New 
Testament writings. Jesus himself wrote nothing. As far as we 
know, at the date of his ascension, nothing respecting him had 
been put in writing. His words, his miracles, the things that he 
suffered, his resurrection, were unrecorded. Not less than a 
score of years may have passed before those first essays at record- 
ing what the disciples knew respecting his life, which Luke 
notices in his prologue, were composed. The oldest writings in 
the New Testament collection are certain Epistles of Paul, which 
were called out by his necessary absence from churches, or by 
special emergencies. Yet the Christian faith was in being ; the 
Church was in being ; the Gospel was preached ; the testimony 
of the apostles was spread abroad ; numerous converts were made. 
Christianity was not made by the Christian Scriptures. 



328 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

4. On the contrary, the Scriptures are the product of the 
Church. They do not create the community ; the community 
creates them. The histories of the Old Testament record the 
progress and fortunes of the people. The historians are of the 
people to which their writings relate. The prophets, with what- 
ever divine gifts of insight and foresight they are endued, spring, 
in like manner, out of the people. The fire that spreads along 
the earth here and there shoots upward, and sends its hght afar. 
The psalm is the inspired expression of the devotion of the great 
congregation gathered within the temple. Even the Proverbs 
have an origin and a stamp among the chosen people which 
make them analogous to the proverb elsewhere, " The wisdom of 
many, and the wit of one." 

As the Gospels were for the Church, so they were from the 
Church. Apostles and their disciples composed them to meet 
a want in the community in which the authors were members as 
well as guides. The Epistles were the product of the Church, 
as well as means of its edification. Their authors were moved 
by the same Spirit, with whatever difference of mode and of 
measure, as the membership among whom they ranked them- 
selves as brethren. There was not even an intention to compose 
a body of sacred literature. The purpose of Providence went 
beyond the writers' intent. The very word " Bible," denoting 
a single book, results from a blunder. A Greek word, in the 
plural, signifying originally " books," it was mistaken in the middle 
ages for a Latin noun of the first declension singular. It was not 
until the oral teaching of the apostles was beginning to be for- 
gotten, and their immediate disciples were passing away, that the 
churches bethought themselves to gather together in a volume 
the writings of the apostles, and writings having an apostolic char- 
acter. The canon was of slow and gradual formation. 

The fundamental reality is not the Bible, it is the kingdom of 
God. This is not a notion. Rather is it a real historical fact, 
and the grandest of all facts. No other kingdom or common- 
wealth ever had a more substantial being. It is older than any 
other ; it has proved itself stronger and more enduring than any 
other ; if there is any good ground for the Christian's faith, it will 
embrace or overspread them all. What is this kingdom ? It is 
the society of believers in God — the society of his loyal subjects 
and children. In its immature stage, under the old dispensation. 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 329 

it existed in the form of an organized political community. Among 
the nations there lived one people which had true thoughts respect- 
ing God, into whose hearts he put true thoughts respecting himself. 
They became conscious — it was he who inspired them with the 
consciousness — of standing in an immediate, peculiar relation to 
him. That they were a " chosen people " was a conviction in- 
eradicably planted within them. Has not this conviction of theirs 
been verified in the subsequent history of mankind ? They were 
made to feel that they were not thus distinguished for their own 
sake, or on account of any merit of their own, but were chosen to 
be witnesses for God to the rest of mankind. There was a divine 
purpose of redemption, in which the entire race was to have a 
share. In the divine intent, to recover mankind from evil, and to 
make the whole earth the abode of righteousness and peace, was 
the ultimate goal. The civil polity and the laws of the chosen 
people were to reflect the will of God as made known from time 
to time through holy and inspired men. The whole course of 
their lives was to be regulated by prescriptions issuing from the 
same divine source. After the monarchical form of government 
was estabhshed, revelation still remained the source of law. Side 
by side with the kings there stood the prophets to declare the 
divine will, to rebuke the iniquitous ruler, and, if need be, to 
exhort the people to disobedience. In the complex progress of 
the world toward the ideal of human perfection, other peoples, 
on the plane of nature, had their respective parts to fulfil. The 
one supreme concern of this Hebrew nation was, and was felt to 
be, religion. Their function among the nations of the earth was 
consciously wrapped up in this one interest. As they well knew, 
other religions besides their own were national. All ancient reli- 
gions were national. 

But other religions were on false foundations, and were doomed 
to pass away. When the political independence of the Israelites 
was lost, their civil polity shattered, the conquered people dragged 
off into idolatrous lands, this consciousness of being possessed of 
the true religion, and of a grand and triumphant future awaiting 
them, not only survived but grew more confident. It not only 
outHved political ruin ; under overwhelming calamities it burned 
with a more intense fervor. More strange than all, there was a 
foresight of a great advance to be made in the intrinsic character 
of this divinely given religion, as well as in the extent of the do- 



330 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

minion to be gained by it. The basis of the religion was the cove- 
nant of God with the people. Under this term the ethical relation 
of Israel with God, whom Israel worshipped, was conceived and 
expressed. The laws and institutions, with the blessings and hopes 
for the future which they expressed and betokened, were inter- 
preted as the conditional promise of the merciful but righteous 
Jehovah.^ But the days were to come when there was to be " a 
new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of 
Judah." Religion was one day to become more spiritual; obedi- 
ence would then no longer be legal or constrained, but spontane- 
ous j the knowledge of God and his ways would be confined to 
no class, but would be diffused among all ; forgiveness would be 
full and free. Such is the remarkable prediction of the prophet 
Jeremiah. Centuries flowed on, the great hope was a hope de- 
ferred ; but the epoch, thus foreseen, at last arrived. The Person 
through whom was to be achieved this vast revolution and expan- 
sion of the kingdom, dimly discerned from afar in certain grand 
outlines, at length appeared. Jesus, the Christ, became the 
founder of a spiritual and universal society. Whoever will look 
into the Gospels will see that it was in this character of the head 
of a kingdom that he appeared. It was of the kingdom of God 
that John, the forerunner, spoke, as near at hand. It was for pro- 
fessing to be a king, however the nature of that claim was mis- 
represented by his accusers, that Christ was put to death. The 
prophecy began to be realized when he commenced to teach and 
to attract to himself disciples. The kingdom was there. This he 
taught when, in answer to the question when the kingdom was to 
begin to be, he said, "The kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation"; "lo ! . . . the kingdom of God is within you," or 
in the midst of you. The kingdom was constituted by Jesois and 
the group of disciples who acknowledged him as Lord and Master, 
and who, like him, were devoted to the doing of the Father's will. 
This last was the criterion of membership in the kingdom, and of 
a title to its blessings. Those who were one with Jesus in this 
filial allegiance were hailed by him as brother and sister and 
mother. Yet the consummation of the kingdom lay in the future. 
Hence the kingdom, although a present reahty, was a kingdom in 
the bud, and therefore a kingdom to come — to come in a double 

1 The history and ideas linked to the word " covenant " are concisely stated 
by A. B. Davidson, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, i. 509 seq. 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 33 1 

sense, in its moral progress among mankind and in mysterious final 
scenes of judgment and victory. So that the prayer of all disci- 
ples was still to be, "Thy kingdom come" — a supplication that 
points both to the continuous progress and transforming influence 
of the Gospel in the world, and to the goal of that progress, the 
final epoch. Precisely how " the kingdom of Christ " or " the 
kingdom of heaven " should be defined is a point on which all are 
not agreed. It was declared by Jesus not to be a " kingdom of 
this world." Its origin was not earthly, but from above. It was 
not, like human sovereignties, to be maintained and spread by 
force. The end of the Founder's mission was to bear witness to 
the truth. The kingdom was to be made up of those who heard 
his voice, who believed and obeyed the witness which he gave. 
In the ancient era of the Church there was the Byzantine idea, 
which tended to regard the Christian state, with the Roman em- 
peror at its head, as the realization of the kingdom. In the West 
it was the Church in its visible organization under the Papacy that 
was identified with the kingdom of Christ. A broader view would 
bring within the circumference of the kingdom all the baptized, 
in whatever Christian fold. A still broader view is that which 
includes within its pale all souls who, accepting Christ as their 
Lord and Saviour, live to do the Father's will. 

No view of the divine kingdom is adequate which fails to see 
that the end of its establishment is the transformation of human 
society. The rescue of individuals from sin and punishment is 
far from being the whole good to be achieved through the instru- 
mentality of revealed religion. Its ethical relations are never to 
be ignored or undervalued. It is here on earth that the will of 
God is to be done. It is here that the desert is " to rejoice, and 
blossom as the rose." The aim of the divine kingdom was and is 
to renovate political and social life. " Judaism," a recent writer 
has well said, " was not a religion merely, but a polity, its aim 
being the establishment of righteousness in the relations of men 
within the commonwealth ; the pohtical and moral laws and the 
national organization form its central point, its kings and judges 
being in the fullest sense ministers of God." Nothing less was 
designed by the later, the Christian dispensation, following upon 
the earlier, than " the establishment and maintenance of true 
relations throughout the whole body of a united and organized 
humanity, under the influence of the Christian spirit of righteous- 



332 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

ness and love." As a means to this end the Church exists — 
an organized community, consisting of a portion of human society 
in which the renewing power of the Gospel has been experienced. 

One might as well doubt whether the sun is in the sky as to 
question the reahty of that new creation which gives its distinc- 
tive character to " the Christian era." Out of Judaism there has 
come into being a spiritual and universal society, however it may 
be more precisely defined, and whatever disputes may exist as to 
its boundaries. It may be added here that all organized bodies 
which hold the Christian faith, including the Church of Rome as 
well as Protestants, unite in pronouncing that the complete deposit 
of revealed truth was with Christ and the apostles. The Church of 
Rome makes tradition an authorized channel for the transmission 
of this truth. But all agree that Christianity is the absolute reli- 
gion. There is a progress in the understanding of it from age to 
age. But the rehgion itself is not defective, and therefore is not 
perfectible. Christianity is not to be put in the same category 
with the ethnic religions, which contain an admixture of error, and 
are capable of being indefinitely improved. The religion of the 
Gospel is absolute. The allegiance of the follower of Christ is 
unqualified. " Ye call me Master and Lord : and ye say well ; for 
so am I." 

Keeping in view this historic kingdom which stands forth as an 
objective reality, beginning in the distant past and carried for- 
ward to its perfected form by Jesus of Nazareth, we have to in- 
quire what is the relation of the Holy Scriptures to it. The answer 
is that they are the documents that make us acquainted with the 
kingdom in its consecutive stages up to its completed form. In 
the Scriptures we are made acquainted with the facts and the 
meaning of the facts. And as in the case of all documentary 
materials viewed in contrast with literary products of later elabo- 
ration, we are brought face to face with the historic transactions 
and with the persons who took part in them. This is the peculiar 
character of the Scriptures, and is at once the secret of their 
transcendent value and the occasion of countless obscurities and 
difficulties. By no other means could we become possessed of 
knowledge so immediate and so vivid. Yet they give occasion 
for the same sort of inquiries that always devolve, in historical 
investigation, on those who delve in the sources. 

Let us take an illustration from secular history. We will sup- 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 333 

pose that the later narratives, such as those of Bancroft and Pal- 
frey, by which a New Englander learns the origin and growth of 
the communities to which he belongs, and their historic relations 
to other parts of America, had not been written — the narratives, 
we mean, which are based on documentary materials, including 
under this head prior accounts whose authors stood nearer to the 
circumstances which they relate than the historians of to-day. 
We are shut up, we will imagine, to this mass of documentary 
materials. There is Bradford's pathetic story of the Pilgrims, of 
their flight from their English home to Holland, their voyage 
across the Atlantic, their settlement and their experiences at Plym- 
outh. We have other writings also, — the " Compact of Govern- 
ment " drawn up in the cabin of the Mayflower ; the diary and 
the letters of John Winthrop, the Massachusetts governor ; the 
earlier and later codes of colonial law ; the " Bay Psalm Book " ; 
Cotton Mather's " Magnalia " ; later still, the history of Hutchinson, 
and along with other productions we have discourses of the most 
influential preachers in the successive generations. As we ap- 
proach the epoch of the Revolution we have the letters and 
speeches of the patriotic leaders ; the records of the first con- 
gresses, local and general ; the Declaration of Independence ; 
contemporary accounts of the war that followed ; the Constitution 
of the United States, and expositions of it by Madison and others 
who took part in framing it ; official papers of the first President 
and his cabinet, etc. Imagine a comprehensive collection of 
these documents. It would consist of prose and poetry, of ora- 
tions, disquisitions, letters, and so forth. Obviously there would 
be inconveniences, especially to an untrained, unlearned student. 
There would be things hard to understand, obscure allusions, 
apparent and real discrepancies of more or less consequence. 
Questions of chronology would arise, and might be difficult to 
solve — such as pertain to the date of laws and usages, and of 
written memorials of the past. A consecutive history prepared by 
a modern student of sound critical judgment would plainly have 
its .advantages. But one superlative advantage it would fail to 
have. The reader would not, in anything like an equal degree, 
be brought into the atmosphere of the former days. He would 
not, in anything like an equal degree, come into living contact 
with the events and into direct personal intercourse with the 
participants in them. His impressions, if in some particulars 



334 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

more exact and more systematic, would lack the color, would want 
the vividness, which are to be caught only from the documentary 
sources. The difference is like that between a treatise on geog- 
raphy, or even the descriptions of a traveller, and an actual jour- 
ney through a country which we seek to know. Let one read 
either of the numerous lives of Jesus which have been written by 
learned scholars in recent times, even when imaginative power 
reenforces the erudition of the author, and then turn to the pages 
of the Evangelists. He will feel at once the difference between 
second-hand and first-hand accounts ; between those who see 
through their own eyes and those who have to use the eyes of 
others. The modern scholars furnish us with collateral informa- 
tion of value, illustrative of the Gospels ; they collate the several 
narrators ; they apply the canons of historical criticism with 
more or less skill ; but where is that living, speaking portrait of 
Jesus, of his walk and his talk, which the original historians, the 
apostles and their companions, give us? It is the difference 
between the herbarium and the leaves and flowers in field or 
forest. In the herbarium the classification is better, but we miss 
the bright hues and the perfume of the blossoms. To the bota- 
nist the herbarium is important, and botany is a useful science 
in its place. But the rose-bush, or a grape-vine with the 
clusters of fruit hanging upon it, has a charm of its own which 
the botanist not more than the unlettered man would be willing to 
spare. 

The beginnings of old kingdoms and empires are commonly 
obscure. They start on their career in the twihght. It is not 
until the day has fairly dawned, until some progress has been made 
on the path of civihzation, that written records arise to be trans- 
mitted to later times. Even then, contemporary writings are 
likely to be scanty and fragmentary. Traditions exist and are 
handed down, but they are subject to the influences that affect 
the oral transmission of narrative matter from generation to gen- 
eration. Thus when the past comes to be studied in an enlight- 
ened age, there is no escape from the necessity of historical 
criticism. The historical student, like other laborers, has to earn 
his bread by the sweat of his brow. The facts of a remote time 
are to be reached only by exploring in places where the light is 
dim. Great rivers may traverse empires, spreading fertihty along 
their banks ; but we have to hunt for their sources. If the cir- 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 335 

cumstances of the rise of the kingdom of God are parallel, there 
is no good reason for surprise. 

The foregoing remarks may throw some light on the question 
how Christianity stands affected by biblical criticism.' The Chris- 
tian faith is expressed in a summary form in the ancient docu- 
ment known as the Apostles' Creed. In its doctrinal aspect, the 
Christian faith was formulated early in the fourth century, in the 
creed called the Nicene, which, as to its main affirmations, has 
been accepted by most organized bodies of Christians. Neither 
of these confessions makes any declaration relative to the origin of 
scriptural books or the kind and degree of authority that pertains 
to them. They are silent on the subject. It is Christianity in its 
cardinal facts and principles which they undertake to set forth. 
This does not imply an undervaluing of the importance of the 
question of the inspiration and authority of the Bible. It illus- 
trates, however, the point that the Christian system of truth is 
separable in thought from varying phases of opinion respecting 
the origin and characteristics of the Scriptures. 

The perception of divine revelation as having for its end the 
building up of a community or kingdom, and as made at the 
basis through a history transacted on the earth, lifts us to a 
plane where critical problems, within a certain reasonable limit, 
may be regarded with comparative indifference. Within that limit 
literary questions having to do with the authorship of books, as, for 
example, whether it be simple or composite, and whether tradi- 
tional impressions as to authorship are well founded ; questions 
having to do, also, with the correctness of the text which has been 
transmitted to us ; questions as to the order of succession in the 
stages of development through which the community of God has 
passed ; questions as to the faultless accuracy of details in histori- 
cal narratives, are no longer felt to be of vital moment. They 
are not points on which the Christian religion stands or falls. The 
timidity which springs out of the idea of Christianity as exclusively 
a book religion, every line in whose sacred books is clothed with 
the preternatural sanctity ascribed by Mohammedan devotees to 
their sacred writings, is dissipated. The Christian believer, as long 
as fundamental verities and the foundations on which they stand 
are unassailed, is no more disturbed by the unveiling of the human 
factor in the origination of the Scriptures, and by finding that 
it played a more extensive part than was once supposed. The 



336 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

treasure is not lost because it is distinctly perceived to be held " in 
earthen vessels." 

In the illustrations given above from American history the litera- 
ture referred to was in the main contemporary with the writings. 
This advantage we have approximately in the use of the New 
Testament. Critical questions connected with the Old Testament 
books and their contents present peculiar difficulties. Yet, on this 
topic, a single observation may be made, which will serve still 
further to elucidate the meaning of what has been said above. 
The observation is, that the religion of Christ stands in an organic 
relation to the Old Testament religion, and that this connection, 
in its most essential features, is an historical fact that admits of no 
rational doubt, whatever views may be taken on other topics per- 
taining to Old Testament literature. The people that gave birth 
to Jesus Christ were a people marked by distinctive peculiarities, 
which are well known, abundantly attested, and universally allowed 
to have existed. They were worshippers of one God, a living 
God, a Spirit, the Creator and sole Sovereign of the universe. 
Along with this peculiar, exalted theism there had come to exist 
the Messianic expectation. There was to be a great expansion, 
purification, triumph, of the kingdom of God — the community of 
his worshippers. There was to be a deliverance. There was to 
be a world-wide extension of the true religion. These are acknowl- 
edged facts. How did that state of things come to be ? How 
did that peculiar community grow into being, which furnished the 
human and temporal conditions of the birth and career of Jesus ? 
How shall we explain that he was born of Israel, and not of the 
Greeks or Egyptians? There is no dispute on the question 
whether there is a close, organic connection between the religion 
of Palestine and the rehgion of Christ. It is a fact too patent to 
be doubted for a moment. 

Back of that peculiar religion, and that whole state of things 
which existed in the Palestinian community and its foreign off- 
shoots at the time when Jesus was born, there lies a history. So 
vast and spreading a tree is not without deep roots. It is perfectly 
obvious that the Old Testament books are the principal, if not the 
exclusive, documents from which we can acquaint ourselves with 
the rise and progress of that unique religion which was the pre- 
cursor and the parent of Christianity. From them we must learn 
who were the human leaders, civil and religious, through whose 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 337 

mediation that religion advanced from its beginnings, and attained 
to the stage of development which it is found to have reached at 
the approach of the Christian era. Now, inquiries may be started 
as to the order of succession in the laws and in the institutions of 
worship, which were not always the same, and even as to what 
precisely was done and contributed by this or that inspired leader 
or teacher. These questions do not necessarily touch Christianity 
in any vital part. They do not necessarily affect in a vital way 
the view that is taken of the history of the people of Israel. In- 
vestigations of Roman history, even when they require the modi- 
fication of previous ideas, do not alter fundamentally our conception 
of the growth, the polity, and the power of the Roman Empire. 
They only make still clearer the ruling ideas that animated the 
Roman people. The history of England is not written now as it 
was written a hundred years ago ; but the existence of the Eng- 
lish monarchy, and the turning-points in its origin and growth, are 
left untouched by the scrutiny of historical criticism. 

Students of the Old Testament generally enlarge the earliest 
group of historical books by adding to it the Book of Joshua, thus 
making a " Hexateuch " instead of a Pentateuch. They generally 
consider the series of books to be composed of a number of 
different documents, varying from one another in their original 
dates, with serious variations not a few in their historic details and 
interpretations. Not only the books in their present form, but 
the constituent documents are considered to have been far later 
in their origin than tradition had taught. One consequence of 
the change of opinion is a common conception of the order of 
events, the reverse of the ordinary view. The period of the 
prophets is considered to have preceded that of the law and of 
the Hebrew ritual as it is set forth in the Hexateuch. It is a di- 
versity as to historic theory, or, a geologist might say, in stratifica- 
tion. The most striking effect of this new chronology is the 
contraction of the bounds of contemporary history and of the 
historical sources, and the consequent loss, as far as the primitive 
era is concerned, of the contemporary evidence which is a princi- 
pal guaranty of trustworthy narratives. Literary criticism in this 
field joins hands with the researches in general history and in 
archaeology which pertain to prehistoric ages. The bibhcal era 
most affected in this way is the pre-patriarchal. In this particular 
the patriarchal period comes next, showing a perceptible advance. 



338 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

The marks of historic credibihty increase at the threshold of the 
Mosaic era. But one characteristic of the Old Testament narra- 
tives stands out in distinct relief. It is the fact of divine revela- 
tion. It is evident from the very first verse of Genesis that the 
legends of the Babylonians and other tribes kindred to the He- 
brews have been sifted of their polytheistic elements. One of the 
most eminent and liberal-minded of modern German theologians 
was guilty of no exaggeration in the remark that the first three 
chapters of Genesis contain more moral and religious truth than 
all other books written independently of the influence of the 
Bible. Among the Hebrews the conception of a tribal deity by 
degrees grows into that of a supreme sovereign, righteous in his 
character, with an expanded, even a world-wide control. This 
purifying and elevating effect, this monotheistic, ethical faith, so in 
contrast with Semitic history elsewhere, is inexplicable save on the 
supposition that it is due to the self-revelation of God. The same 
fact in the Hebrew religion is presupposed in the rise and progress 
of the Messianic expectation. The progress of the Hebrew reli- 
gion from its earliest stages, as the Old Testament brings it to 
light, must have been conditioned on the appearance of leaders 
inspired to guide the people onward and about whom the people 
could rally. Whatever may be true of individuals described as 
such, their historic reality and influence at the great turning-points 
have a strong inherent probability. 

Even the critics who carry the theory of non-Mosaic authorship 
to the point of denying that the decalogue, at least in the form in 
which it stands, proceeds from its reputed human author, do not, 
as a rule, call in question the fact that Moses was the founder of 
the legislation and religious institutions of the nation of Israel. 
Reuss, who was one of the most original and learned of the critics 
of the modern school, emphatically declares ^ that the agency of 
Moses was of so influential and far-reaching a character that in 
the whole course of the history of Israel, prior to Jesus, there ap- 
peared no personage to be compared with him. He towers 
above all that followed in the long line of heroes and prophets. 
If the codes, as it would seem, were kept open, still on any view 
that does not pass the bounds of reason, "the law came by Moses." 
The recollection of the leadership of Moses, of his grand and 
dominating agency in the deliverance of the people from bondage, 
1 Geschichte d. heiligen Schriften d. A. T., vol. i. 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 339 

and in laying the foundations of their theocratic polity, was indel- 
ibly stamped upon the Hebrew mind. To discredit a tradition so 
deeply rooted in the generations that followed would be a folly of 
incredulity. It might almost be said that the voice of the great 
Lawgiver reverberates down the subsequent ages of Hebrew his- 
tory, until the appearance of him whose teaching fulfilled, and in 
that sense superseded, the utterances of them "of old time." 
Ewald has dwelt impressively on the living memory, the memory 
of the heart, transmitted from father to son, of the great redemp- 
tion from Egyptian slavery — the standing type of the mighty 
spiritual deliverance to be achieved by a greater than Moses. If 
Moses was in reality so effective an agent in forming the Israelitish 
nation and in shaping its peculiar system ; if, in truth, so powerful 
an impulse emanated from him as critics so competent as Reuss 
allow, the question is naturally suggested, whether there would be 
wholly wanting (since the art of writing was then well known) 
contemporary records, and something from the pen of Moses him- 
self. If there is nothing improbable in the tradition that he was 
learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, then it would be no 
marvel if, to some extent, he committed his laws and injunctions 
to writing. But these are critical inquiries upon which we are not 
called on here to dilate. 

In defining the attitude which the Christian believer may rea- 
sonably take in relation to biblical criticism, there are two or three 
considerations which deserve to be specially insisted on. It is 
now assumed that the evidences of the supernatural mission of 
Jesus, and of his miracles, have produced the conviction which 
they warrant. It is obvious, in the first place, that so far as criti- 
cal theories spring from the rejection of the supernatural, either 
as in itself impossible, or as having no function in connection with 
the religion of Christ, those theories have no weight. They are 
vitiated by the bias which lies at their root. They proceed upon 
an unscientific, because disproved, hypothesis that the religion of 
the Bible is a purely human product. When it is denied that a 
particular author wrote a certain book, or that it was written at a 
certain date, or that incidents related in it are true, or that predic- 
tions in it were made, and this denial depends simply on the a 
priori disbelief in the supernatural, it is of no value, and, to a 
Christian believer, will carry no weight. A theory respecting the 
matters just enumerated may be broached by one who disbelieves 



340 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

in the resurrection of Jesus, and it may be sound, although it con- 
travenes traditional opinion; but as far as that theory involves, as 
a presupposition and a conditio sine qua non, the denial or doubt 
of the resurrection, it is worthless. This criterion at once disposes 
of a mass of critical speculation about the literature of the Bible 
and its contents, which has no more solid foundation than the 
arbitrary assumption that a miracle is impossible, or that Chris- 
tianity is not from God in any other sense than is true of Buddh- 
ism. Belief in Christianity as coming supernaturally from God 
does not justify one in dispensing with critical investigation, which, 
it need not be said, in order to be of any value, must be prose- 
cuted thoroughly and in a candid and truth-loving spirit. Neither 
does it justify one in disregarding the canons of historical judg- 
ment, for the reason that particular features of a narrative are 
miraculous, and that miracles are possible, and have actually taken 
place at points along the line of divine revelation. An historical 
religion must verify itself, not only in general and as a whole, but 
also in its various parts, to the historical inquirer. That is to say, 
from the general truth, when once established, of the supernatural 
origin of the rehgion of the Bible, the strict verity of all the facts 
recorded in it, whether natural or supernatural, cannot at once be 
logically concluded. The tests of historical criticism must be 
applied as well to details as to the system as a whole. 

Does it comport with the essentials of Christian belief to hold 
that deception may, in any instances, have been used in connection 
with the authorship of books of Sacred Scripture ? For example, 
can it be admitted that what is known in ecclesiastical history as 
*' pious fraud " had a part in the framing of scriptural books? For 
instance, is it consistent to allow that an author may have palmed 
off a book, historical or didactic, as the production of an honored 
man of an earlier time ? In answer to these questions it is to be 
said at the outset that the supposition of an intended deception 
ought not to be allowed without satisfactory proof. It cannot be 
safely asserted that the author or authors of the apocryphal book 
of Enoch, which is referred to in Jude (ver. 14), and no part of 
which goes back farther than the age of the Maccabees, meant 
that readers should beheve Enoch, " the seventh from Adam," to 
have been the writer. It may be in this, as no doubt it was in 
other cases, a mode of giving dignity and weight to lessons which 
the real author thought would be less efficacious if put forth in his 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 341 

own name, but which he cast into this form with no intent to have 
them beheved to be productions of the elder time. At the same 
time we should be cautious about assuming that a refinement 
of ethical feehng, equal to that which Christianity develops and 
demands, existed at all periods under the ancient dispensation. 
If there was, in general, an inferior stage in the development of 
conscience, it is not incredible that, even in holy men, there was 
a less dehcate sense of truth and a less sensitive observance of the 
obligation of strict veracity. How far it may have pleased the 
Divine Being to allow this lack of moral discernment to affect 
the literary activity, as we know that it affected in other provinces 
the personal conduct and judgment, of holy and inspired men, we 
cannot a priori — at least, not with absolute confidence — deter- 
mine. Everything must yield at last to the fair verdicts of a 
searching but reverent scholarship, which explores the field with 
the free and assured step of a Christian believer. 

This brings us to the further remark that the authority of Christ 
and of the apostles, once established by convincing proofs, is de- 
cisive. Nothing that clashes with that authority, when its charac- 
ter and limits are rightly understood and defined, can stand. The 
evidence against any critical theory which, if admitted, would be 
in collision with the authority of Jesus and of the apostles, would 
so far forth impinge upon the faith of a Christian. But while this 
is to be borne in mind, it is equally necessary to avoid erroneous 
interpretations of their teaching, as far as it bears on literary and 
critical questions in connection with the Scriptures, their author- 
ship and contents. A dogmatic utterance on such points, on the 
part of the Saviour or of the apostles, is not to be hastily inferred 
from references and citations which may not have been designed 
to carry this consequence. Not less essential is it to avoid an 
incautious, unverifiable extension of the teaching function which 
was claimed by Jesus for himself, and was promised by him to 
the apostles. The incarnation, in the deeper apprehension of it 
which enters into the evangelical theology of the present time, 
is perceived to involve limitations of the Saviour himself in statu 
humiliationis, which were formerly ignored. A stricter exegesis 
does not tolerate an artificial exposition, which was once in vogue, 
of passages which assert or indicate such a restriction, voluntary 
in its origin, during the period when the Lord was a man among 
men. It must be made clear that the Lord intended to declare 



342 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

himself on points like those to which we have adverted, and that, 
directly or by implication, he meant to include them within that 
province which he knew to belong to him as a religious and ethical 
teacher, and in which he spoke as " one having authority." 

If so much must be admitted by the most reverent disciple 
respecting the Great Teacher himself, surely not less must be said 
of the apostles. How far peculiarities of education, traditional 
and current impressions respecting the topics involved in bibhcal 
criticism, were left untouched, and continued to influence them, 

— not only while they were with Jesus, but also after the Spirit of 
inspiration had qualified them to go forth as heralds in his service, 

— can be settled by no a priori dictum, but only through pro- 
cesses of careful study. The sooner the wise words of Bishop 
Butler are laid to heart by Christian people, the better will it be 
for their own peace of mind, and for the cause of Christianity in 
its influence on doubters and in its conflict with foes. " The only 
question," says Butler, " concerning the truth of Christianity is 
whether it be a real revelation, not whether it be attended with 
every circumstance which we should have looked for ; and, con- 
cerning the authority of Scripture, whether it be what it claims to 
be, not whether it be a book of such sort, and so promulged, as 
weak men are apt to fancy a book containing a divine revelation 
should be." ^ 

The apostles were empowered to understand and to expound 
the Gospel. The real purport and end of the mission, the death, 
the resurrection, of Jesus were opened up to their vision. His 
words, brought back to their remembrance, unfolded the hidden 
meaning with which they were laden. The relation of the anterior 
dispensation to the new era, the one being anticipatory of the 
other, they, if not instantly, at least gradually, saw into. Thus 
were they qualified to lead, and not to mislead, to teach, and to 
guide the Church. But not only were they men of Hke passions 
with ourselves, but in knowledge they had no part in omniscience. 
That which inspiration made clear to them was not made clear 
instantly and all at once. He who was not behind the chief of 
the apostles ranked himself among those who now " see through 
a glass, darkly," and waited for the full disclosure of truth which 
should supersede his dim and fragmentary perceptions. 

There is an order of things to be believed. Before the scrip- 
1 See also the context, Analogy, p. ii. c. iii. 



RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO THE BIBLE 343 

tures of the New Testament, Christ was preached and believed 
in : so now, prior to minute inquiries, and the exact formulation 
of doctrines, about the canon and inspiration, Christ is offered to 
faith. The grand outlines of the Gospel, both on the side of fact 
and of doctrine, stand out in bold relief. They are attested by 
historical proof. They are verified by evidences which are irre- 
spective of many of the subjects of theological debate and of 
biblical criticism. The recognition of Christ in his character as 
the Son of God and Saviour of men is the prerequisite for engaging 
successfully in more remote and difficult inquiries respecting the 
literature and the history of revealed religion.^ 

1 The Relation of Biblical Teaching to Natural Science is treated in the 
Appendix, Note 22 ; The Relation of Biblical Criticism to Prophecy, in 
the Appendix, Note 23. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 

" First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." 
This picture Jesus himself drew of the foreseen expansion of his 
kingdom. The kingdom was to be " as if a man should cast seed 
upon the earth." He plants it and leaves it; he sleeps and rises, 
"night and day." Meantime the seed springs up and grows, "he 
knoweth not how." It goes through, one after another, the stages 
of development up to the ripeness of the fruit. A parable, it need 
scarcely be said, is framed to illustrate one point, and is not to 
be pressed beyond the intended scope. As rain and sunshine are 
required for the growth of wheat, we are taught elsewhere that 
divine influences are needful, and are never disconnected from 
the operation of the truth in the minds of men. There is enough 
complementary teaching of Jesus to preclude any mistake or one- 
sided view in this direction. Yet the parable shows the confidence 
of Jesus in the perpetuity and progress of his kingdom. There 
resides in it, so he declared, a self-preserving, self- developing life. 
The seed, once planted, might be left with entire unconcern as to 
its growth. In these days, when "development" is a word on 
every tongue, we are often told that the conception of nature and 
natural law is foreign to the Scriptures. No assertion could be 
more mistaken. Even on the first page of the Bible, although the 
design there is to set in the foreground the creative agency of God, 
we read that the earth was bidden to bring forth the grass, the 
herb, and the fruit-tree, each yielding, " after his kind," " whose 
seed is in itself." In the parable of Jesus of which we are speak- 
ing it is said that " the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself," 
that is, to transfer the Greek term into English, " automatically." 
The epithet is chosen which denotes most precisely a self-acting, 
spontaneous energy, inherent in the seed which Jesus, through his 
discourses, his acts of mercy and power, and his patience unto 
death, was sowing in the world. This grand prophetic declaration, 

344 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 345 

Uttered in a figure so simple and beautiful, in the ears of a little 
company of Galileans, was to be wonderfully verified in the coming 
ages of Christian history. 

It is not, however, the progress of Christianity since it was fully 
introduced by Christ and the apostles that we have now to con- 
sider. The development of the understanding of Christianity on 
the side of doctrine and of ethics, the advance to a more and 
more just and enlightened comprehension of the Christian rehgion, 
the unveiling of the riches of meaning involved in it, is a fascinat- 
ing theme. But all this belongs under the head of the interpreta- 
tion of Christianity, that term being used in a broad sense. The 
religion of the Gospel means vastly more to-day than it was ever 
perceived to mean before. This enlarged meaning, however, is 
not annexed to it or carried into it, but legitimately educed 
from it, through the ever widening perceptions of Christian men 
whom the Spirit of God illuminates. The starry heavens are now 
what they were of old ; there is no enlargement of the stellar 
universe except that which comes through the increased power 
and use of the telescope. TFie globe on which we dwell to-day is 
the same that it was twenty centuries ago. Yet during the past 
ages there has been a progressive advance in astronomical and 
geographical discovery. No one commits the blunder of con- 
founding discovery with creation. 

What we have to speak of now is development and progress 
in the contents of Revelation itself, in the interval between its 
remotest beginnings and the epoch when the apostles finally 
handed it over in its ripe, consummated form to the Church, to 
be thereafter promulgated throughout the world. Of divine 
revelation itself the saying is likewise true, " First the blade, then 
the ear, then the full corn in the ear." The fact that Revelation 
was progressive, that it went forward like the advance from dawn 
to noonday, may suggest the hasty, unwarranted conclusion that it 
was a natural process merely. Some will be quick to leap to this 
rash inference. As regards natural religion, the fact that creation 
is found to have been progressive, that unsuspected links unite its 
consecutive stages, that the tendency of science is to unveil a 
certain continuity in nature, leads the short-sighted to ignore the 
supernatural altogether. They imagine that there is no need to 
call in God to explain nature except where breaks are met in the 
chain of mechanical causation. It is enough, they imagine, to be 



346 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

able to trace back the planetary system to a fiery vapor preceding 
it, as if the existence, or the order, or the beauty, of the astro- 
nomic system were thereby explained. If it be true that the plants 
in their multiplied species " or kinds " spring out of a few primi- 
tive germs, or out of only one, the evidence of forethought and 
will-power in the organization of the vegetable kingdom is not in 
the least weakened. Nor would it be effaced if the spontaneous 
generation of the living from the lifeless were an ascertained fact 
of science. It is another fruit of that same unreflecting tendency 
to dispense with God where there is observed an orderly progress 
of phenomena, which leads to the ignoring or denial of the super- 
natural in connection with the gradually developing religion of 
redemption. The critical researches of the time disclose bonds 
of connection between successive stages of religious and moral 
teaching in the sacred volume. As in geology, there is less need 
than was formerly thought to fall back on the supposition of 
catastrophes along the path. The rudiments of what once seemed 
an utterly new form or phase of doctrine are detected at a point 
farther back. Behind the most impressive inculcations of truth 
are found the more or less unshapen materials out of which they 
were framed. The statue is followed back through the different 
sets of workmen to the quarry where the marble was hewn out of 
its bed. Before the Lord's Prayer was given by the Master, some 
of the petitions contained in it had lain dispersed, like grains of 
gold, in the arid waste of rabbinical teaching. The first effect on 
a novice in literary studies of looking behind Shakespeare's plays 
to the tales out of which they were woven, is to lessen in some 
slight degree his previous impression of the poet's originality. In 
a much greater degree is this effect produced by a first glance at 
the spoils of the past which Milton gathered — from Homer, the 
Greek tragedians, Dante — and incorporated into his poems. 
That revealed religion is revealed, and is not the product of 
human genius, despite the gradual unfolding of that religion and 
the coherence of its parts, becomes increasingly evident the more 
thoroughly its characteristics are appreciated. Its unique charac- 
ter finds no satisfactory explanation in the native tendencies of 
the Semitic race. History belies such a naturalistic solution, 
of which Renan is one of the later advocates. This can be said 
while it is conceded that there were, no doubt, qualities in the 
Hebrew people which caused them to be selected as the recipi- 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 347 

ents of revelation, and as witnesses for God to the rest of man- 
kind. When we contemplate the true religion in its long, 
continuous advance upward to its culmination in the Gospel of 
Christ ; when we survey this entire course of history as a con- 
nected whole, we are struck with the conviction of super- 
natural agency and authorship. When the outcome appears at 
the end in Jesus Christ and his work, light is thrown back on the 
divine ordering of the long series of antecedent steps. The 
accompaniment of miracle is a crowning token, reenforcing all 
other proofs of the supernatural, and confirming faith by an 
argument to the senses. 

In glancing at the historic process of revelation, as that is dis- 
closed by the scriptural documents, there is one transition which 
none can overlook. It is the contrast, on which the apostle Paul 
builds so much, between law and gospel, the old covenant and the 
new. It is true that the Old Testament is not wanting in procla- 
mations of the merciful character of God. It was a part of the 
life and soul of the books of prophecy. The apostle Paul himself 
insists that the Old Testament religion was, in its very foundation, 
a religion of promise, and that the function of the law was to fill 
an intermediate space and to do a subsidiary office, prior to the 
realization of the promise. His doctrine is, moreover, that even 
the Gospel contains a new disclosure of God's righteousness, 
which was made necessary by his having passed over human sins 
in the period of comparative ignorance. The atonement pre- 
vents the misconstruction which the divine forbearance in dealing 
with law-breakers in the earlier times might occasion. Still, 
the older revelation of God was comparatively a manifestation 
designed to impress on those to whom it was made his justice 
and unsparing abhorrence of transgression. Only as far as ill-desert 
is felt can pardon be either given or received. An education of 
conscience must precede a dispensation of grace. The later 
revelation was one of forgiving love. The superiority of Christi- 
anity to the Old Testament religion is the subject of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. Its author will show that Christ is the " medi- 
ator of a better covenant " — a covenant with " better promises." 
" For," he pointedly remarks, " if that first covenant had been 
faultless," there would have been no occasion and no room for 
the second. The world-embracing compass of God's love, its 
inclusion of the Gentile races, was one of the prime elements in 



348 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the Gospel. This was the " mystery " which had been hidden 
from "ages and generations." The ordinary meaning of the 
term " mystery " in the New Testament writings is not something 
which is still unknown or inscrutable, but something which had 
before been concealed from human knowledge, but had now been 
brought to hght. And the term is specially applied to the pur- 
pose of God to show mercy to the world of mankind — a purpose 
which had been partially concealed from men, or at best but 
obscurely divined. That in the older dispensation rules were in 
the foreground ; in the later, principles, is a more comprehensive 
statement of the difference. 

What precisely was the conception of God which was enter- 
tained in the earliest periods of Hebrew history is a subject of 
debate. There are questions which will be settled variously, 
according to the different views which are adopted respecting 
the date and relative authority of the documents. That the pro- 
cess of expelling the vestiges of polytheism and image-worship from 
the practices of the Israelitish people was accomphshed slowly, is 
sufficiently clear. The cult of household images did not at once 
disappear. The assumption, involved in language uttered by the 
heathen, that the gods of other nations than Israel are real beings 
and exercise power, although it may be less than the power of 
Israel's God, of itself determines nothing as to the doctrine of 
Israel's own accredited teachers. But Jethro, although a Midian- 
ite prince, was the father-in-law of Moses, and we find him saying, 
" Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods." Jephthah 
says to a Moabite king : " Wilt thou not possess that which Che- 
mosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever the Lord 
our God hath dispossessed from before us, them will we possess." 
Even Solomon wavered in his beliefs on this subject. Side by side 
with the altars of Jehovah he built altars to foreign gods. Even in 
the early Church the idea prevailed that the deities of the heathen 
were demons — really existing, but evil and inferior in power. It 
would be natural for the half- enlightened Hebrews to imagine that 
there was some sort of territorial limit to the jurisdiction of the 
God whom they worshipped. An indistinct idea of this kind is at 
least a natural explanation of the story of the attempted flight of 
the prophet Jonah to Tarshish, which lay on the western border 
of the Mediterranean. There is a curious disclosure of a natural 
feehng in the fact recorded, without censure or comment of any 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 349 

sort, of Naaman, the Syrian captain. He craved permission to take 
into Syria two mules' burden of earth, — the sacred soil of Israel, 
— that upon it he might offer sacrifice to Jehovah. Scholars of 
high repute consider the earliest belief of the descendants of 
Abraham to have fallen short of a positive monotheism, and to 
have been rather a monolatry, — the worship of one God to the 
exclusion of all other worship, but without an explicit disbehef in 
the existence of other divinities who have respectively their own 
earthly realms to govern. Then the progress of faith would 
include, first, the idea of the God of Israel as more powerful than 
all other deities ; and then, later, the ascription to him of almighti- 
ness, and the distinct conviction that all other gods are fictitious 
beings. The path from a more narrow conception of God to a 
pure and absolute monotheism involved a deepening ethical idea 
of the attributes of Israel's God. Wellhausen writes, " Jehovah be- 
came the God of Justice and Right ; as God of Justice and Right 
he came to be thought of as the highest, and at last as the only, 
power in heaven and earth." The reader of statements of this 
kind should bear in mind that we are in a field where preposses- 
sion and speculative theorizing play a great part. If Jehovah, at 
the outset, was regarded as simply the tribal god, the sovereign 
protector of that one people, while the other nations were imag- 
ined to have each its own guardian divinity, the expansion of this 
primitive notion into the pure and lofty conception of the only 
true and living God, the world's creator and ruler, which is pre- 
sented in soul-stirring language by the most ancient prophets, is a 
marvel. The transformation is really insoluble on any naturahstic 
theory. Even on the supposition that there was this gradual up- 
lifting of religion from the low plane on which all pagan nations 
stood, and that the notion of a mere local divinity, of limited 
control, gave way to the majestic conception of one Lord of 
heaven and earth, the maker of all things, the ruler of nations, 
the universal sovereign, — no conclusion would be so reasonable 
as that God Almighty took this method of gradually disclosing 
his being and attributes to that portion of the human race from 
whom, as from a centre, the light of the true faith was eventually 
to radiate to the rest of mankind. 

Neither the Hebrew people generally nor their leaders were 
metaphysicians. In the earlier ages especially, they entered into 
no analytic discrimination of matter and spirit. They pictured 



350 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

to themselves the varied activities of God, of whose personality 
they had the most vivid idea, in phrases descriptive of the feel- 
ings and actions of human beings. It is remarkable that the 
anthropomorphism of the scriptural writers is predominantly in 
what is related of Jehovah, the name of God in his relation to the 
chosen people, — the Deity (Elohim) as the God of Revelation. 
At length, by explicit statute, all visible representations of God 
were forbidden as profane. In Deuteronomy, as in Exodus, 
images of him are prohibited. " Ye saw no manner of form on 
the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb" (Deut. iv. 15). 
The prophets guarded against all material associations attaching 
to the notion of the Supreme Being. A distinct step in this 
direction is to be observed in a passage in Isaiah, where it is said, 
" Now the Egyptians are men, and not God ; and their horses 
flesh, and not spirit" (Is. xxxi. 3). Yet it is not definitely said 
in the Old Testament that God is a spirit. This was the declara- 
tion of Jesus to the woman of Samaria. 

The universal Providence of God is a cardinal element in 
Christian theism. Nothing is independent of him. There is no 
province exempt from his control, where rival agencies hold sway 
and thwart his designs. We can easily understand why, in the 
early stages of revelation, all emphasis should be laid on the 
sovereign power of God, and why a clear separation of his direct 
efficiency from his permissive act should be reserved for a later 
day. It was always taught, indeed, and holds true for all time, 
that according to a law of habit, of which the Creator of the soul 
is the author and sustainer, sin engenders further sin. A self- 
propagating power inheres in transgression. In numberless ex- 
amples it is observed that sin is thus the penalty of sin. It is true 
now, as it was always true, that a loss of moral discernment and a 
fixedness of perverse inchnation are an ordained effect of persist- 
ent evil-doing. The law which entails this result is but another 
name for a divine operation. Hence it is a false and superficial 
theology which will find no place for "judicial blindness " and for 
a " hardening of heart " that deserves to be called a judgment of 
God. So far the scriptures of the New Testament are in full 
accord with the scriptures of the Old. But there are certain 
forms of representation which, in the introductory periods of Reve- 
lation, go beyond these statements, and ascribe to God a positive 
and immediate agency in the production of moral evil. Some- 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 351 

times the hardening of the heart is spoken of as if it were the end 
which is directly aimed at. Such passages, taken by themselves, 
would warrant the harshest doctrine of reprobation which hyper- 
Calvinism has ever broached. The proper treatment of such 
passages is not — certainly not in all cases — to pronounce them 
hyperboles. It is not through unnatural devices of interpretation 
that we are to rid ourselves of the difficulty which passages of this 
nature occasion. The reference of them to a fervid rhetoric — in 
some instances, to say the least — may not be the right solution. 
Why may we not see in them that vivid idea of God's limitless 
power and providence which has not yet arrived at the point, or 
felt the need, of qualifying the conception by theological discrimi- 
nations? If it be asked how it was possible to reconcile the 
perception of the ill-desert of sin with the ascription of it to God's 
causal agency, the answer is that the question of their consistency 
was not thought of. Reflection was required before their incon- 
sistency could attract attention, and the need of removing it be 
felt. In more than one philosophical system — for example, in 
Stoicism — there is found an earnest ethical feeling, which con- 
demns wrong action, side by side with a metaphysical theory as 
to the origin of moral evil which logically clashes with such an 
abhorrence of it. The two judgments do not jostle each other, 
because they are not brought together in the thoughts of those 
who entertain them. Where there is more reflection in the mat- 
ter, as in Spinoza and his followers, it is still possible to keep up 
a degree of moral disapproval along with a theory which really 
ought to banish it as absurd. In the ancient scriptures, and 
occasionafly in the New Testament, especially in passages cited 
from the Old, the evil-doing and perdition of classes of men, their 
misunderstanding and perversion of the truth, are set forth as 
ends in themselves. Being involved in the circle of occurrences 
which are comprised in the general scheme of Providence, they 
are no surprise to him who carries it forward. They were fore- 
seen and taken into the account from the beginning. It was 
arranged that they should be overruled and made the occasion of 
good. Their relation to Providence is emphasized in speaking of 
them as being directly aimed at and pursued on their own account, 
or for the sake of an ulterior benefit. As we foUow down the 
progress of Revelation, we sec that needful distinctions are more 
frequently made and more carefully insisted on. In the second 



352 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

book of Samuel (xxiv. i) it is said that God "moved" David 
against Israel, with whom he was displeased, and bade him go 
and number the people. The impulse or resolution of David, on 
account of which he was subsequently struck with compunction, 
is there said to have emanated directly from God himself. But 
in the later history (i Chron. xxi. i), in the record of the same 
transaction, we read that it was Satan who " provoked David to 
number Israel." The earlier writer does not hesitate to describe 
God's providential act as if it were the direct object of his prefer- 
ence, — an explicit injunction ; and the fact of David's repentance 
for doing the act does not present to the writer's mind any diffi- 
culty. The chronicler, from a later point of view, sets forth the 
act of David in such a way as to exclude, if not to contradict, 
the supposition that it was God who prompted it. 

The gradualness of the disclosure of the merciful character of 
God is one of the most obvious features of Revelation. One part 
of this disclosure pertains to the heathen, and to the Hght in which 
they are regarded. It was natural that the contempt and loathing 
which idolatry and the abominations of paganism excited in the 
heart of the pious Israelite — feelings which the Mosaic revelation 
developed and stimulated — should be felt towards heathen wor- 
shippers themselves. The hatred thus begotten might awaken an 
implacable desire that vengeance should fall upon them. An 
impressive rebuke of this unmerciful sentiment, and what is really 
a distinct advance in the inculcation of an opposite feeling, is 
found in the book of Jonah. There are reasons which have availed 
to satisfy critics as learned and impartial as Bleek, who are 
influenced by no prejudice against miracles as such, that this 
remarkable book was originally meant to be an apologue, — an 
imaginative story, linked to the name of an historical person, a 
prophet of an earlier date, — and was composed in order to incul- 
cate the lesson with which the narrative concludes. One thing 
brought out by the experience of Jonah is that God's mercy is so 
great that even an explicit threat of dire calamities may be left 
unfulfilled, in case there intervene repentance on the part of those 
against whom it was directed. The prophet, who was exasperated 
at the sparing of the Ninevites, was taught how narrow and cruel 
his ideas were, by the symbol of the gourd, " which came up in a 
night, and perished in a night." He was incensed on account of 
the withering of the gourd which had shielded his head from the 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 353 

sun. The Lord referred to Jonah's having had pity on the gourd, 
and said, " And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, 
wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot dis- 
cern between their right hand and their left hand ; and also much 
cattle? " This humane utterance, in which pity is expressed even 
for dumb brutes, is memorable for being an important landmark in 
Scripture, since it marks a widened view of God's compassion. 
To illustrate this truth the narrative was written, and toward it as 
onward to a goal it steadily moves. It is a mistake to think that 
ill-will toward heathen nations pervades the Old Testament. 
When they were full of animosity against the kingdom of God and 
determined to destroy it, anger burned fiercely against them, and 
prayers went up for their defeat and destruction. Very different 
was the feeling with which Cyrus and the Persians were regarded. 
We find that the conversion of the heathen nations becomes an 
object of devout aspiration. The sublime prayer of Solomon, at 
the dedication of the temple, for the " stranger " and " the peoples 
of the earth," is only one of the passages in which this feehng is 
poured out. In Micah, who was not the latest of the prophets, we 
find the prediction that unto the mountain of the Lord the heathen 
peoples will flow, will ask to be taught of his ways, and will prom- 
ise to " walk in his paths " (Micah iv. 1-4). An idea of the king- 
dom at once so comprehensive and so spiritual was the fruit of time 
and progress. 

The truth of a righteous moral government over the world per- 
vades Revelation from the beginning. Obedience to law will not 
fail of its due reward ; guilt will be punished in a just measure. 
But under the Old Testament system, nearly to its close, the 
theatre of reward and penalty was confined to this world. The 
horizon was practically bounded by the limits of the earthly life. 
It was here, on earth, that well-doing was to secure the appropriate 
blessing, and sin to encounter its meet retribution. The Israelite, 
like other men of antiquity, was wrapped up in the state. He felt 
that his weal or woe hinged on the fortunes of the community in 
whose well-being his affections were, in a degree beyond our 
modern experience, absorbed. The prophets never ceased to 
thunder forth the proclamation that the fate of the community 
would be surely, in the providence of God, determined by its 
fidelity or its disloyalty to its moral and rehgious obligations. If 
they deserted God, he would forsake them. The people were to 

2A 



354 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

be rewarded or punished, blessed or cursed, as a body. And so in 
reality their experience proved. Moreover, as regards the single 
family and the individual, the tendencies of righteous action 
under the laws of Providence, were then, as always, on the whole 
favorable to the upright in heart. The arrangements of Providence 
were in their favor. But in process of time it became more and 
more painfully evident that this rule was not without numerous 
exceptions. The righteous man was not uniformly prospered. 
He might be poor, he might be oppressed, he might be condemned 
to endure physical torture, he might perish in the midst of his 
days. On the other hand, the wicked man was often seen to 
thrive. His wealth increased. He grew in power and influence. 
His life was prolonged. How could the justice of God be 
defended? How could the allotments of Providence — this dis- 
harmony between character and earthly fortune — be vindicated ? 
This problem became the more anxious and perplexing as the 
minds of men grew to be more observant and reflective. How to 
explain the lack of correspondence between the condition and the 
deserts of the individual? This problem is the groundwork of 
the book of Job. A righteous man is overwhelmed by calamities 
one after another. His lot is to himself a dark and terrible 
mystery. But his consolers, when they break silence, solve it in 
the only way known to their theology. Such exceptional suffering 
implies an exceptional amount of guilt. Job must have been a 
flagrant transgressor. Of this fact his dismal situation is proof 
positive. The wrath of Jehovah is upon him. Conscious of the 
injustice of the allegation brought against him, yet unable to con- 
fute the logic of it. Job can do nothing but break out in loud com- 
plaints extorted by his anguish and the bewilderment into which 
he is thrown. He cannot see any equity in the lot which has be- 
fallen him. His outcries give vent to a pessimistic view of the world 
and of the divine management of it. Another interlocutor brings 
forward the inscrutable character of God's doings. What more 
vain and arrogant than for so weak and helpless a creature as man 
to pretend to sound the unfathomable counsels of the Almighty, 
or to sit in judgment on his ordinances? This, of course, is a 
rebuke, but contains no satisfactory answer to the questions which 
the distress of Job wrings from him. But the real answer is given. 
Afflictions may have other ends than to punish. They may be 
trials of the righteousness of a servant of God. They are a test 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 355 

to decide whether it springs out of a mercenary motive. Hence 
it is not to be inferred that his sufferings are the measure of his 
ill-desert. Thus a distinct advance is made in the theodicy. 
New vistas are opened. Pain has other designs and uses besides 
the retributive function. Yet at the end Job's possessions and his 
earthly prosperity are restored to him. The feeling that even 
here on earth there must be, sooner or later, an equahzing of 
character and fortune, is not wholly given up. 

External evidence is of no service in determining the date of 
the book of Job. Internal evidence, especially the character of 
its themes and reasonings, indicate that it could not have been 
written earlier than when the monarchy was verging on its down- 
fall. Another book, Ecclesiastes, belongs to a period when doubt 
and speculation had made a much further advance. It may be- 
long to the closing days of the Persian, or the early days of the 
Greek, dominion. It is the composition of a keen-sighted ob- 
server of human Hfe in its multiform aspects and, it would seem, 
with a large personal experience of its necessities. In the course 
of a stream of sceptical and pessimistic utterances on human ex- 
istence as a scene of inevitable disappointment, with no hope of 
a hereafter, we find interjected, here and there, the recognition 
of God and his government. We reach at the close a solemn 
reminder of the righteous order under his sway and of duty as the 
sum of human wisdom. To some of the critics this conclusion 
appears to be the supplement of another writer or editor, but as 
Driver suggests, it may quite as probably have sprung from the sense 
of the need on the part of the author, of such a conclusion, to 
counteract the impression of the preceding portions of his work. 
The species of doubt, leading to an almost cynical tone, which 
characterize it, indicate that speculation and even rationalizing 
were coming in. The book has perplexed alike ancient Jews and 
modern Christian theologians and critics. It was not until after 
centuries that at the Jewish council of Jamnia (about 90 a.d.) its 
admission to the Canon of the Old Testament was sanctioned. 
It is one of the books which compel the perception of different 
degrees of inspiration in the scriptures. Its admission into the 
canon is not to be regretted. It has a part in the Old Testament 
documents in showing us the successive phases of the Hebrew 
religious consciousness in its age-long development under the 
tutelage of Providence and the unerring light upon things not 
seen, imparted by the spirit of God. 



356 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Besides the lesson conveyed in the book of Job, it was revealed 
then to the religious mind that suffering, besides being inflicted 
as the wages of sin, might also be sent to put to the test the stead- 
fastness of the sufferer's loyalty to God, to prove the unselfish- 
ness of piety (by showing that it might survive the loss of all 
personal advantages resulting from it), and to fortify the soul in 
its principle of obedience and trust. But rehef from perplexity 
in view of the calamities of the righteous came from another 
source. This was the perception of the vicarious character of the 
righteous man's affliction. This idea emerges to view in a distinct 
form in the great prophets. The pious portion of Israel, the kernel 
of the people, suffer not for their own sake, but on account of the 
sins of the nation, and as a means of saving it from deserved pen- 
alties and from utter destruction. This view is brought out by 
Isaiah in his description of the servant of Jehovah. The concep- 
tion is gradually narrowed from Israel as a whole, or the select 
portion of Israel, and becomes more concrete ; so that in the 
fifty-third chapter the sufferer appears to take on the distinct 
character of an individual, the Messianic deliverer. It is declared 
that the popular judgment respecting the sufferer, which attributes 
to him personal guilt, and sees in his lot the frown of God, is mis- 
taken. Penalties are laid on him, he is taking on himself penalties 
which not he, but others, deserve to bear. How this principle of 
vicarious service is illustrated in the life and death of Jesus, and 
how abundantly it is set forth in the New Testament, it is need- 
less to say. The men whose blood Pilate had mingled with 
their own sacrifices were not sinners above all the Galileans. 
The eighteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell were not 
offenders above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem. Who had 
sinned, the Wind man or his parents, that he was born blind? 
His blindness, Jesus rephed, was not a penalty for the sin of 
either. This problem of the distribution here on earth of suffer- 
ing in discordance with desert, of which we are speaking, had 
new light shed upon it by the gradually developing faith in the 
future life ; but of this point I will speak further on. In general, 
the contrast between the general tenor of Old Testament descrip- 
tions of the reward of the righteous, and of the New Testament 
declarations on the same theme, is very marked. In the Old 
Testament it is riches, numerous children, safety of person and of 
property, which are so often assured to the righteous. The words 



THE GRADU ALNESS OF REVELATION 357 

of Jesus are, "In the world ye shall have tribulation." Yet the 
essential character of God, the eternal principle of justice that 
will somehow and somewhere be carried out in the government 
of the world, is at the root alike in both dispensations. 

He who would appreciate the progress of Revelation has only 
need to compare the silence as to a hereafter and the gloom that 
encompasses the grave — characteristic features of ancient Scrip- 
ture — with the definite assurances and the triumphant hopes 
which are scattered over the pages of the New Testament. On 
this subject we can trace the advance from the night to the 
brightening dawn, and from the dawn to midday. The hopes and 
aspirations of the ancient Israelites were bounded by the limits 
of the present life. Their joys and sorrows were here ; here, as 
we have seen, were their rewards and punishments. It is true 
they did not positively believe that their being was utterly extin- 
guished at death. On the contrary, they found it impossible so 
to think. There was some kind of continuance of their being, 
vague and shadowy though it was. When it is said of the worthies 
of old that they died and were " gathered to their fathers," it is 
not to their burial — certainly not to their burial alone — that the 
phrase points. It was used of those who died far away from their 
kindred. A continued subsistence of some sort is implied in it. 
Necromancy was a practice which was forbidden by law ; and the 
need of such a law proves that the belief and custom prohibited 
by it had taken root. The story of the appearance of Samuel, 
and the occupation of the witch of Endor, show at least a popular 
notion that the dead could be summoned back to hfe. Sheol, the 
Hades of the Israelites, was thought of as a dark, subterranean 
abode, a land of shades, where existence was almost too dim to 
be denominated life. There was nothing in this unsubstantial 
mode of being to kindle hope, or to excite any other emotion 
than that of dread. In the poetical books, Sheol is personified 
and depicted as full of greed, opening her mouth " without meas- 
ure," and swallowing up all the pomp and glory of man. In a 
splendid passage of Isaiah, Sheol is represented as disturbed by 
the approach within her gloomy domain of the once mighty king 
of Babylon, and as stirring up the shades, the dead monarchs, to 
meet him. They exult over his downfall and death, crying, " Is 
this the man who made the earth to tremble, who made kingdoms 
to quake, who made the world as a wilderness, and broke down 



358 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the cities thereof ? " But this is only a highly figurative delinea- 
tion of the humiliating fall and death of the arrogant, dreaded 
sovereign. It is not until we have passed beyond the earlier writ- 
ings of the Old Testament that we meet, here and there, with 
cheerful and even confident expressions of hope in relation to the 
life beyond death. In the later Psalms there is an occasional 
utterance in this vein. The sense of the soul's communion with 
God is so uplifting as to forbid the idea that it can be broken by 
death. Jesus refers to the Old Testament declaration that God 
is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a sufficient warrant 
for the belief in the continued immortal life of those who stood 
in this near, exalted relation to the Eternal One. What other — 
at least what higher — evidence of immortality is there than is 
derived from the worth of the soul ; and what indication of its 
worth is to be compared with its capacity to enter into living 
fellowship with God ? How can a being who is admitted to this 
fellowship be left to perish, to exist no more ? 

Besides this connection of faith in a future life with the relation 
of the righteous and believing soul to God, the demand for an- 
other state of being to rectify inequalities here arose by degrees in 
religious minds. The strange allotment of good and evil, whereby 
the good man, and not the bad man, was often seen to be the suf- 
ferer, and the holy were found to be maligned and the victims of 
oppression, led to the expectation of a Hfe beyond, where this con- 
fusion would be cleared up and an adjustment be made according 
to merit. The moral argument, which Kant, and others before 
and since, have presented as the ground for believing in a future 
state, was a revelation from God to the Hebrew mind, and not the 
less so because this belief stood connected with experiences and 
perceptions that went before. There is a familiar passage in the 
book of Job in which the hope of a reawakening from death is 
perhaps expressed. It is the passage beginning, " I know that 
my Redeemer " — or Vindicator — " liveth." The confessions of 
hopelessness in earlier portions of the book, the impassioned asser- 
tions that there is nothing to be looked for beyond death, are to 
be counted in favor of the other interpretation, according to which 
Job expected that his vindication would occur prior to his actual 
dissolution. On the contrary, however, it is not improbable that 
the foresight of an actual reawakening to life is represented as 
having flashed upon his mind, displacing the former despondency. 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 359 

Certain it is that distinct assertions of a resurrection appear, here 
and there, in the later Scriptures. For in the bibhcal theology it 
is the deliverance of the whole man, body as well as soul, which 
in process of time comes to be the established behef. It is closely 
associated with the conviction that in the triumph and blessedness 
of the kingdom the departed saints are not to be deprived of a 
share. It was not a belief derived from the Persians, but was in- 
digenous among the Hebrews, — an integral part of revelation, — 
however it may have been encouraged and stimulated by contact 
with Persian tenets. Not to refer to statements, relative to a resur- 
rection, of a symbolical character, — such as the vision of dry bones 
in Ezekiel, — we find in the twenty-sixth chapter of Isaiah a pas- 
sage which is explicit, and, as it would seem, is to be taken literally. 
In the Revised Version the passage reads, " Thy dead shall live ; 
my dead bodies shall arise." There is a critical question, it should 
be stated, as to the date of the chapter in which these words 
occur. In the Psalms there are not wholly wanting passages of a 
like purport. In the book of Daniel, which belongs, certainly in 
its present compass, to the Maccabean period, the resurrection of 
both the righteous and the wicked Israelites is very definitely pre- 
dicted. As is well known, the resurrection was an accepted doc- 
trine of orthodox Jews in the period following that covered by the 
canonical books. In the New Testament, immortality, and with 
it the resurrection, stands in the foreground. Through the death 
and resurrection of Jesus there comes a new illumination, a signal 
disclosure of God's purpose of grace and of the blessed import of 
eternal life ; so that death is said to be " abolished," and life and 
incorruption "brought to light " (2 Tim. i. 10). 

Other illustrations, within the sphere of religion as distinguished 
from ethics, of the gradual progress of Revelation, will occur to 
every student of the Bible. One of these we may find in the devel- 
opment of the idea of sacrifice. Among ancient peoples generally, 
the approach to a superior — a human lord — was by supplications 
and gifts. In the same way it was natural to approach the divinity, 
and come into immediate intercourse with him. As far as a special 
character belonged to Hebrew sacrifices, it was owing to the 
higher conceptions of God which pertained to the religion of 
Israel, and to the express ordinances and regulations under which 
all religious observances were placed. But the Old Testament 
sacrifices were gifts to God, varying in their specific import by 



36o THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

the particular feelings to be expressed and the particular benefits 
to be sought. A surrender was made of something precious, sig- 
nifying self-devotion to Jehovah on the part of him who brought 
the offering. When there was a rupture of relations by reason of 
sin, the sacrifice took on a modified significance, and peculiar expe- 
riences of feeling were evoked in connection with it. In the age 
of the prophets, the spiritual elements of religion are brought into 
the foreground, and in comparison with them, and in case they 
are absent, the worthlessness of all ceremonial practices is loudly 
proclaimed. This elevated view comes out in the fifty-first Psalm, 
where God is said not to delight in sacrifice, but to crave as an 
offering " a broken and a contrite heart." The sacrifices of the 
ritual system might avail to take away the pain of self-reproach for 
a time, and with reference to particular transgressions. But the 
insufficiency of offerings of this nature became increasingly evident. 
At last the essential idea of sacrifice was realized and exhibited by 
him who could say of himself, " Lo, I am come to do thy will " 
(Heb. X. 9). Here was no outward gift, but himself — his own 
life — that was brought, in a willing surrender, to the Father. 
Here was the chmax of self-denial, or devotion to the Father's 
will and appointment. " He loved us and gave himself up 
for us" (Eph. V. 2). The self-surrender of the Christian, even 
of his body, to God, the dedication of himself to God, is styled 
by the apostle Paul our *' reasonable," or spiritual, "service," in 
contrast with the external and visible sacrifices of the old ritual 
(Rom. xii. i). 

Another illustration still is presented in the Messianic idea, as 
that idea is gradually unfolded and by degrees transfigured in the 
Old Testament, and carried to perfection in the New. Messianic 
prophecy passes forward from its immature, germinant state in the 
earlier times, until it appears in the lofty and spiritual forms in 
which it blossoms out in later ages. The Old Testament commu- 
nity was itself prophetic. Everything in it pointed to the future. 
The very fact that God had entered into a direct relation to this 
one people carried in it the promise of victory and universality. 
But what should be the characteristic features of the coming day, — 
this was a matter on which light must be shed gradually. Only as 
the community grew and advanced could it be taught to compre- 
hend itself and forecast the future. A progress or growth of 
prophecy was therefore a necessary incident. Even inspired men 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 36 1 

could never be transported to a distant age. There were always 
limits in the prophetic anticipation, colors in the picture caught 
from the scenery and atmosphere in the midst of which the prophet 
lived and wrote. In the blessing recorded of Jacob, in his saying 
that the sceptre should not depart from Judah ; in those exultant 
prophecies of the dominion that would be gained by the kingdom 
of David and his successors, which we meet with in the Psalms ; 
in the foresight, granted to the great prophets of Israel, of an ap- 
proaching era of universal righteousness and peace ; in the portrait, 
in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, of the suffering servant of Jeho- 
vah, — we find different phases of Messianic prediction. In that 
chapter of the " evangelical prophet " the anticipation comes 
nearest to the ideal in certain essential features. But for the ideal 
purified from all imperfections of time and place and finite appre- 
hension we must look to the character of the Messiah himself, 
and to the work actually achieved by him. 

When we leave theology for the domain of ethics, the progres- 
sive character of Revelation is capable of abundant illustration. 
The Sermon on the Mount has for its theme that fulfilment of 
law, that unfolding of its inner aim and essence, which Christ 
declared to be one end of his mission. Morality is followed down 
to its roots in the inmost dispositions of the heart. The precepts 
of Jesus are a protest against the Pharisaical glosses which tradi- 
tion had attached to Old Testament injunctions. It is " the right- 
eousness of the Scribes and Pharisees " which is pointedly 
condemned. It is still a controverted question, however, whether 
the reference to what had been said by or to " them of old time " 
was intended to include Old Testament legislation itself, as well 
as the perverse, arbitrary interpretations which had been attached 
to it by its theological expounders. Plainly the injunction of 
Jesus to love the enemy as well as the neighbor goes beyond the 
directions in Leviticus (xix. 17, 18) : "Thou shalt not hate thy 
brother in thine heart. . . . Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor 
bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself." Here nothing is said of any except 
the " neighbor." The prohibition is limited to the treatment of 
national kinsmen. That the general obligation to the exercise of 
good- will toward wrong-doers and foes, wherever they may be, 
and to the cultivation of a forgiving temper toward all men, finds 
in the Gospel an unprecedented expansion and emphasis, is evi- 



362 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

dent to all readers of the New Testament. A supplication for the 
pardon of enemies forms a part of the Lord's Prayer. The hope 
of personal forgiveness is denied to those who are themselves un- 
forgiving. The example of Jesus, and the pardon offered to the 
most unworthy through him, are a new and potent incentive to the 
exercise of a forgiving temper. 

A glance at the ideals of ethical worth in the early ages of Israel 
is enough to show how sharply they contrast with the laws of 
Christ and the type of character required and exemplified in the 
New Testament. It was once said by an eminent divine that the 
patriarchs, were they living now, would be in the penitentiary. 
Polygamy and other practices, the rightfulness of which nobody 
then disputed, the wrongfulness of which nobody then discerned, 
are related of them, and related without any expression of disap- 
proval. Whoever has not learned that practical morality, the 
ramifications of a righteous principle in conduct, is a gradual 
growth, and that even now, after the generic principles of duty 
have been set forth in the Gospel, and a luminous example of the 
spirit in which one should live has been afforded in the life of 
Jesus, the perception of the demands of morality advances from 
stage to stage of progress, is incompetent to take the seat of 
judgment upon men of remote ages. A while ago a letter of Wash- 
ington was published, in which directions are given for the trans- 
portation to the West Indies and sale there of a refractory negro 
who had given him trouble. The act was not at variance with the 
best morality of the time. The letter is one that deserves to cast 
no shade on the spotless reputation of its author. Yet a like act, 
if done to-day, would excite almost universal reprobation. To 
revile the worthies of Old Testament times as if they lacked the 
vital principle of unselfish loyalty to God and to right, as they un- 
derstood it, is not less irrational than to deride the habitations 
which they constructed, or the farming-tools which they used to 
till the ground. It is not the less imperatively required of us, 
however, to recognize the wide interval that separates the ancient 
conceptions of morality from those of the Gospel. Jael, the wife 
of Heber the Kenite, entered heart and soul into the cause of 
Israel in the mortal struggle with the Canaanites. In lending aid 
to the cause which she espoused she did an act of atrocious cru- 
elty and treachery. She enticed Sisera into her tent, and when he 
was sleeping, drove a tent-pin through his head. Yet for her deed 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 363 

she is lauded in the song of Deborah the prophetess (Judges v.), 
" Blessed above women shall Jael be, the wife of Heber the 
Kenite ! " Almost the same words were addressed to the Virgin 
Mary (Luke i. 42), " Blessed art thou among women ! " What an 
infinite contrast between the two women to whom this lofty dis- 
tinction is awarded ! Nothing is better fitted to force on us the 
perception of the gradualness and the continuity of the unfolding 
of morality in the scriptures. 

We meet in the Psalms with imprecations which are not conso- 
nant with the spirit of the Gospel ; they belong on a lower plane 
of ethical feeling. It is one thing to experience a satisfaction in 
the just punishment of crime. It is accordant with Christianity 
to regard with conscientious abhorrence iniquity, whether we our- 
selves or other men are the sufferers by it. Indifference to base 
conduct, be the root of this state of mind a dulness of the moral 
sense or false sentiment, is, to say the least, not less repulsive, and 
may be more demoralizing, than the fires of resentment which 
nothing but fierce retaliation can quench. But the spirit of re- 
venge is unchristian. Christianity teaches us to distinguish be- 
tween the offence and the offender : the one we are to hate ; the 
other we are forbidden to hate. Moreover, Christianity never 
loses sight of the possibility of reformation in the case of wrong- 
doers. The Christian considers what an individual might be, not 
merely what he now is. The benevolent feeling, therefore, is not 
allowed to be paralyzed by the moral hatred which evil conduct 
naturally and properly evokes. As regards personal resentment, 
the Christian disciple is cautioned never to forget his own ill-desert 
and need of pardon from God, and the great boon of forgiveness, 
in the reception of which the Christian life begins. These quali- 
fications and correctives of passion were comparatively wanting in 
the earlier dispensation. 

Many expressions of wrath in the Old Testament are directed 
against the enemies of God and of his kingdom, by whom Israel 
was attacked or threatened. They are outbursts of a righteous 
indignation, and as such merit respect, even though an alloy of 
personal vindictiveness may unhappily mingle in them. It was no 
fault to be incensed against impious and cruel assailants of all that 
was precious to a patriot and to a reverent worshipper of Jehovah. 
It is impossible, however, to refer all the imprecations in the 
Psalms to a feeling of the authors in relation to such enemies of 



364 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

God and of his kingdom. No devices of interpretation can har- 
monize with the precepts of Christ such expressions as are found 
in the 109th Psahii : " Let his children be fatherless, and his wife 
a widow. Let his children be vagabonds, and beg. . . . Let the 
extortioner catch all that he hath. . . . Let there be none to 
extend mercy unto him : neither let there be any to have pity on 
his fatherless children." The wrath of the author of this lyric 
against the cruel and insolent one who " persecuted the poor and 
needy man, and the broken in heart, to slay them," it is fair to 
assume was merited. The sense of justice and the holy anger at 
the root of these anathemas are in themselves right. They are 
the result of a divine education. But they take the form of re- 
venge, — a kind of wild justice, as Lord Bacon calls it. The 
identification of the family with its head is one of " the ruling 
ideas " of antiquity. It appears often in the methods of retribu- 
tion which were in vogue in the Old Testament ages. It gave 
way partly and by degrees, under that progressive enlightenment 
from above through which individual responsibility became more 
distinctly felt and acknowledged, both in judicial proceedings and 
in private life. The distinctive spirit of the Gospel is shown in 
the rebuke of Jesus when the disciples proposed to call down fire 
from heaven to destroy the inimical Samaritans (Luke ix. 55). It 
is most impressively seen in his prayer on the cross, *' Father, for- 
give them ; for they know not what they do " (Luke xxiii. 34). 

It is the characteristic of Old Testament laws and precepts 
that in them bounds are set to evils, the attempt immediately to 
extirpate which would have proved abortive. Something more 
than this must be said. There was lacking a full perception of 
the moral ideal. In the Old Testament expositions of duty, as we 
have already seen, there is an approach toward that radical treat- 
ment of moral evils which signalizes the Christian system. An 
additional example of this feature of the preparatory stage of reve- 
lation may be found in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs. 
There " Lemuel," the name of a king, or a name appHed to one 
of the kings, is apostrophized. He is exhorted to practise chastity 
and temperance. " It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for 
kings to drink wine ; nor for princes strong drink : lest they drink, 
and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the 
afflicted." What better counsel could be given ? The judge on 
the bench must have a clear head. But the counsellor, in order 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 365 

to strengthen his admonition, proceeds to say, " Give strong 
drink unto him that is ready to perish." So far, also, there is no 
exception to be taken to the wisdom of his precept. The Jews 
had a custom, resting on a humane motive, to administer a sus- 
taining stimulant or a narcotic to those undergoing punishment, in 
order to alleviate their pains. Something of this kind was offered 
to Jesus on the cross. But the counsellor does not stop at this 
point. He says : " Give strong drink unto him that is ready to 
perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him 
drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more." 
There need be no hesitancy in saying that this last exhortation is 
about the worst advice that could possibly be given to a person in 
affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property. The thing to tell 
him, especially if he has an appetite for strong drink, is to avoid it 
as he would shun poison. Yet our remark amounts to nothing 
more than this, that the sacred author sets up a barrier against 
only a part of the mischief which is wrought by intemperance. 
His vision went thus far, but no farther. It is a case where, to 
quote a homely modern proverb, " Half a loaf is better than no 
bread." It would be a great gain for morality and for the well- 
being of society if magistrates could be made abstinent. 

On this general subject there is no more explicit criticism of 
Old Testament law than is contained in the words of Jesus re- 
specting divorce. The law of Moses permitted a husband to 
discard his wife, but curtailed his privilege by requiring him to 
furnish her with a written statement which might serve as a means 
of protection for her. This statute, as far as the allowance to the 
man which was included in it is concerned, is declared by Christ 
to have been framed on account of " the hardness of heart " of 
the people. It fell below the requirement of immutable morality. 
It was a partial toleration of an abuse which it was then imprac- 
ticable to seek to cut off altogether. But Christianity Hfted the 
whole subject to a higher level. It presented a profounder view 
of the marriage relation. It superseded and annulled the Mosaic 
enactment. 

The advance of the New Testament revelation in its relation 
to the Old has become, in these days, obvious. But the New 
Testament revelation, in itself considered, was not made in an 
instant as by a lightning flash. It did not come into being in all 
its fulness in a moment, as the fabled Minerva sprang from the 



366 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

head of Jove. As in the case of the earlier revelation, the note 
of gradualness is attached to it. The fundamental fact of Chris- 
tianity is the uniting of God to man in the person of Jesus Christ. 
Peter's confession respecting his person is the rock on which the 
Church was founded. The Epistle to the Hebrews opens with 
the following striking passage (as given in the Revised Version) : 
" God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets 
by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these 
days spoken unto us in his Son." The former revelations were 
made through various channels, and were besides of a fragmentary 
character. They paved the way for the final revelation through the 
Son, whom the writer proceeds to liken, in his relation to God, to the 
effulgence of a luminous body. But modern exegesis and modern 
theological thought, while leaving untouched the divinity of Jesus, 
have brought into clear light that progressive development of the 
Saviour's person from the incarnation at the starting-point. Not 
until his earthly career terminated and he was " glorified " was 
the union of God and man in his person, in its effects, consum- 
mated. More was involved in his being in the "form of a ser- 
vant " than theology in former days conceived. Nothing is more 
clear from his own language respecting himself, as well as from 
what the apostles say of him, than that there were limitations of 
his knowledge. On a certain day Jesus started from Bethany 
for Jerusalem. He was hungry. Seeing at a distance a fig-tree 
with leaves upon it, he went toward it, expecting to find fruit, — 
it being a tree of that kind which produces its fruit before putting 
out the leaves. But when he came to it his expectation was 
deceived ; " he found nothing but leaves." Jesus said that he 
did not know when the day of judgment would come. Apart 
from conclusive testimonies of this character, it is evident from 
the whole tenor of the Gospel histories that he was not conscious 
of the power to exercise divine attributes in their fulness of activity. 
The opposite idea gives a mechanical character to his actions and 
to most of his teachings. How, if he was all the while in the ex- 
ercise of omniscience, could he " marvel " at the unbehef of certain 
of his hearers ? That when he was a speechless babe in his mother's 
arms he was consciously possessed of infinite knowledge, is an 
impossible conception. And the difficulties of such a conception 
are only lessened in degree at any other subsequent day while he 
was " in the flesh." When we behold him at the last, prior to 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 367 

the crucifixion, we find his soul poured out in the agonizing sup- 
plication, " If it be possible, let this cup pass from me." The 
supposition of a dual personality in Christ is not less contrary to 
the scriptures and to the creed of the Church than it is offensive 
to common sense and to philosophy. Yet he was conscious of 
a unity with God altogether exceptional, and the unfolding within 
him of this unassailable conviction kept pace with the develop- 
ment of his liuman consciousness. The dawning sense of the 
unique relation in which he stood to God comes out in his boy- 
hood, in the words addressed to his mother when he was found 
with the doctors in the temple, " Wist ye not that I must be in 
my Father's house?" And the limitations of Jesus must not be 
exaggerated or made the premise of unwarranted inferences. He 
knew the boundaries of his province as a teacher, and never over- 
stepped them. Just as he refused to be an arbiter in a contest 
about an inheritance, saying, " Who made me a judge or a divider 
over you?" so did he abstain from authoritative utterances on 
matters falling distinctly within the sphere of human science. 
No honor is done to him, and no help afforded to the cause of 
Christianity, in attributing to him scholastic information which he 
did not claim for himself and which there is no evidence that 
he possessed. It is not less important, however, to observe that, 
notwithstanding the limits that were set about him by the fact of 
his real humanity, and as long as he dwelt among men, there was 
yet an inlet into his consciousness from the fountain of all truth. 
" No one knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither doth any 
know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son 
willeth to reveal him" (Matt. xi. 27). His knowledge differed 
in its source, in its kind and degree, from that of all other sons 
of men. "The words that I say unto you I speak not from 
myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works." The 
divine in him was not a temporary visitation, as when the Spirit 
dwelt for a brief time — sojourned, one may be permitted to say 
— in the soul of a prophet like Isaiah. Even then God spoke 
through the prophet, and the mind of the prophet might for the 
moment became so fully the organ of God that he spoke through 
the prophet's lips in the first person. But in Christ there was 
an " abiding " of the Father. The union was such that the whole 
mental and moral life of Jesus was an expression of God's mind 
and will. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." As 



368 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

conscience in me is the voice of another, yet is not distinct from 
my own being, so of Christ is it true that the Father was in him, 
— another, yet not another. And this union, although real from 
the beginning, culminated in its effects not until a complete 
ethical oneness was attained, at the end of all temptation and 
suffering, — the oneness which found utterance in the words, 
" Howbeit not what I will, but what thou wilt." This was the 
transition-point to the perfect development of his being, which 
is styled his "glorification." As the risen and ascended Christ, 
he can be touched with sympathy with the human infirmities of 
which he has had experience, at the same time that he can be 
present with his disciples wherever they are, — can be in the 
midst of the smallest group of them who are met for worship. 
From Jesus himself we have a distinct assurance that the reve- 
lation which he was to make was not to end with his oral teach- 
ing. . Near the end of his life he said to the disciples, " I have 
yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." 
They were not ripe for the comprehension of important truth, 
which therefore he held in reserve. The Holy Spirit was to open 
their eyes to the perception of things which they were not yet 
qualified to appreciate. The communication of the Spirit ushered 
in a new epoch. Then the apostles took a wider and deeper view 
of the purport of the Gospel. We find in the Epistles an unfold- 
ing of doctrine which we discover in the germ in the conversa- 
tions and discourses of Jesus. It was impossible, for example, that 
the design of his death could be adequately discerned prior to the 
event itself, and as long as the disciples could not be reconciled 
even to the expectation of it. In isolated sayings of Jesus, in par- 
ticular in what he said at the institution of the Lord's Supper, the 
import of it is taught. The giving of his life, he said figuratively 
on another occasion, was to avail in some way, as a ransom. But 
it was not until the cross had been raised that the doctrine of the 
cross was made an essential part of Christian teaching, and the 
great sacrifice became a theme of doctrinal exposition. By this 
subsequent teaching a void which had been left in the instructions 
of the Master was filled. In his teaching there were two elements, 
standing, so to speak, apart from each other. On the one hand, 
he set forth the inexorable demands of righteous law. In this 
respect no portion of the older scriptures, in which law was so 
prominent a theme, is equally adapted to strike the conscience 



THE GRADUALNESS OF REVELATION 369 

with dismay. On the other hand, there was in the teaching of 
Jesus the most emphatic proclamation of God's compassion and 
forgiving love. These two sides of the Saviour's teaching are 
connected and harmonized in the apostoHc exposition of the 
atonement. 

The apostles themselves, individually, as regards their percep- 
tions of truth, their insight into the meaning of the Gospel and its 
bearings on human duty and destiny, did not remain stationary. 
How they attained to a more catholic view of the relation of the 
Gentiles to the Gospel and to the Church, the New Testament 
scriptures explain. Apart from this subject, where their progres- 
sive enlightenment is so conspicuous a fact, there can be no doubt 
that from day to day they grew in knowledge. When the earliest 
writings of Paul, the Epistles to the Thessalonians, are compared 
with two of his latest writings, — the Epistles to the Colossians 
and Ephesians, — we not only find perceptible modifications of 
tone, but in the later compositions we find also views on the scope 
of the Gospel — what may be termed the universal, or cosmical, 
relations of the work of redemption — such as do not appear in 
his first productions. As a minor pecuHarity, it may be mentioned 
that when he wrote to the Thessalonians he seems to have ex- 
pected to be alive when the Lord should come in his Second 
Advent ; while in his latest Epistles this hope or expectation has 
passed out of his mind. As the Gospel and the First Epistle of 
John are the latest of the apostolic writings, it is permissible to 
regard them as the fullest and ripest statement of the theologic 
import of the GospeL 

The ordinary Protestant doctrine respecting the seat of author- 
ity requires, in order to have a tenable basis, that the gradualness 
of revelation be taken into account. The authority of the Bible 
must be understood as applicable within the sphere of moral and 
religious teaching. The biblical writers, with this very important 
qualification, entertained the views current in their times on the 
matters now included in the function of natural and physical 
science. The historical writers were not addicted to antiquarian 
researches. Their predominant motive as authors was moral and 
rehgious. It was a great mistake formerly to predicate of them 
the absolute accuracy in narrative which is prized and, in a meas- 
ure, exacted, in modern savans. The root of the Protestant prin- 
2 B 



370 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

ciple on the seat of authority is faith in the supreme authority 
of Jesus Christ as a moral and religious teacher. Such authority 
over faith and conduct, if ascribed to the Bible, must be attributed 
to the Bible as a whole, and not, in the strict sense, to its parts 
individually considered. This is clear enough from the way in 
which Jesus himself spoke of Old Testament precepts and other 
teachings, and from a similar course on the part of the apostles. 
The truth to which attention is now called is this : the amendment 
in which we are justified by the Protestant maxims, so far as bibli- 
cal writings belonging to earlier stages of revelation are concerned, 
is authorized by Christ in the New Testament. For example, when 
we take exception to precepts uttered or approved by prophets con- 
cerning the way of regarding and treating enemies, we follow the 
dictates of the Sermon on the Mount. We are still within the circle 
of biblical instruction or command, or of the one example recog- 
nized as perfect. In short, it is the Bible as a whole, and con- 
sidered as a self-interpreting — we might say, self-amending — 
authority, that we are either bound to obey, or are safe in follow- 
ing.^ History is an instructive witness to the mischief that has 
been wrought from an oversight of this principle ; for example, 
from regarding the Mosaic system as the model of a Christian 
commonwealth. 

1 This truth is well stated by Rothe, in his Zur Dogjjiatik. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 

Christianity is one of many religions which exist or have existed 
in the world. They may be divided into three classes, — the reli- 
gions of barbarian tribes, past and present ; the national religions, 
which have sprung up within a single nation or race, and have not 
striven for a farther extension ; and the universal religions, which, 
not content to stay within national boundaries, have aspired to a 
general or universal sway. To this last class. Buddhism and Chris- 
tianity unquestionably belong. The rehgion of the Israelites, before 
it assumed the Christian form, had spread extensively among men 
of foreign birth ; and its adherents were zealous in making prose- 
lytes. Yet converts were partly or fully transformed into Jews, 
and incorporated with the race of Israel. Mohammedanism was 
at first the religion of one people, and at the outset it may not 
have been the design of its founder to extend it beyond the 
national limits. But the design was widened : it became a con- 
quering faith, and has, in fact, included within its pale numerous 
votaries of different nations and tongues. 

The study of pagan and ethnic religions has been carried for- 
ward, in later times, in a more sympathetic spirit. Elements of 
truth and beauty have been carefully sought out in the beliefs and 
worship of heathen nations. Rehgious ideas and moral precepts 
which deserve respect have been pointed out in the ethnic creeds. 
The aspirations at the root of the religions outside of the pale of 
Christianity, the struggle of the soul to connect itself with the 
supernatural, and to realize ideals of an excellence above any 
present attainment, have been justly appreciated. This aspect of 
heathenism, it should be observed, however, is recognized in the 
New Testament. The apostle Paul builds his discourse at Athens 
on the acknowledged ignorance of the Divinity, for whom there 
was, nevertheless, a search and a virtually confessed yearning. He 
cites the teaching of certain heathen poets as consonant with the 
truth on the great point of man's filial relation to the Deity. The 

371 



i 



372 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Christian Fathers traced wise and holy sayings of heathen sages to 
rays of light from the Logos, — the Divine Word, — or to an illu- 
mination from the Spirit of God. Devout missionaries, in recent 
days, have been impressed with the conviction that individuals, of 
whom Confucius was one, have been providentially raised up to 
be the guides of their people, to instil into them higher truth, and 
to prepare them for better things. Points of affinity and of 
accordance between the Bible and the sacred scriptures of peoples 
ignorant of Christianity have not been overlooked by Christian 
scholars. Even the fables of mythology may betray gUmpses of 
truth not capable of being grasped on the plane of nature. They 
may disclose a craving which Christianity alone avails to appease, 
and may thus be unconscious prophecies of Him who is the desire 
of all nations. Even the Avatars of Vishnu, countless in number, 
indicate that through man the full revelation of God is looked for. 
They may be considered a presage, in a crude form, of the his- 
toric fact of the Incarnation. 

Christianity differs from the other religions in its contents, and 
in the verifiable sanction which furnishes the ground for an assured 
behef. This last feature is of itself a distinguishing merit. If 
much that is taught by Christ and the apostles should be found 
here and there in the literature of the world, the supernatural 
sanction which changes hope into assurance, and doubting behef 
into conviction, would be of itself an inestimable advantage. In 
this place it is the contents of Christianity which we have to con- 
sider in comparison with the tenets of other creeds. 

When we say of Christianity that it is the absolute religion, it is 
not meant that we have in it a full-orbed discovery of divine things. 
" We know in part " (i Cor. xiii. 9). It is meant that Christianity 
is not to be classified with other religions as if it were defective in 
the sense of containing error, or as if it stood in need of a comple- 
ment to be expected or required on the present stage of human 
life. With no Hmit to its increasing capacity to illuminate right 
action, it is now in substance and in its principles incapable of 
amendment. 

It is well, at the outset, to give prominence to the grand 
peculiarity of the Christian religion, which constitutes the central 
point of difi"erence between it and the ethnic religions. Revelation 
is the revelation — the self-revelation — of God. The doctrine of 
God is the sun which irradiates the whole system, and keeps 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 373 

every part in its place. There may be excellent moral suggestions 
in the non-Christian systems and cults. There may be partial, 
momentary glimpses of the Divine Being himself in certain aspects 
of his character. But nowhere, save in the religion of the Bible, 
and in systems borrowed from it, is there a full view of the per- 
fections of God, — such a view as gives to moral precepts their 
proper setting and the most effectual motive to their observance. 
This essential characteristic of Christianity the apostle Paul held 
up to view in his discourse at Athens. There was worship — in 
its way, genuine worship — among the heathen, but an ignorance 
of its true object. It was so far an agnosticism as to leave a void 
in the soul of the worshipper. In a few striking sentences the apos- 
tle, justifying his title of the "Apostle to the Gentiles," presented 
to view the only living God, a Spirit, the Creator and Ruler of the 
universe, in whom we live, and to whom we are responsible. The 
whole conception of man, of his duties and destiny, and of the goal 
to which all things tend, is colored and determined by the primary 
ideas relative to God. What, let us now inquire, have other re- 
ligions to say of him ? Heathen religions generally fail altogether 
to disengage God from nature. Hence polytheism is the pre- 
vailing fact. Whether the various religions preserve in them 
traces of an earlier monotheism is a disputed point ; scholars are 
not agreed on the question ; and a bias, on one side or on the 
other, frequently appears in the recent discussions upon it. As 
the existing diversity of languages is entirely consistent with the 
hypothesis of an original unity of speech, although the phenomena 
do not positively establish this doctrine, so it may be possibly 
respecting religion. Vestiges of a primitive simple theism may 
have utterly disappeared, yet such may have been the religion of 
the primitive man. Certain it is that, as we contemplate the 
religions which history and ancient literature exhibit to us, we 
find them at a distant remove from a pure and spiritual appre- 
hension of the Deity. Where there was a supreme God, other 
divinities divided power with him ; and none of them were con- 
ceived of as absolute, as independent of nature. Tien, or 
Shang-ti, the supreme God of the Chinese, was Heaven conceived 
of as Lord or sovereign Emperor. Dr. Legge, the learned trans- 
lator of Confucius, holds that "Tien" signifies the Lord of the 
Heavens. He finds in the conception an early monotheism. 
This was not the understanding of tlie Roman Catholic mission- 



374 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

aries in the last century, nor is it the interpretation of the most 
competent missionaries at present. The testimony of Chinese 
authors, says Dr. Hopper, " is uniform and the same. Every- 
where it is the visible heaven which is referred to." " They refer 
to an intelKgent soul animating the visible heaven, as the soul 
animates the body of a man." The religion of the Bactrian 
prophet Zoroaster was a dualism. An eternal principle of evil, a 
god of darkness, the source of everything baleful and hateful, con- 
tends against the rival deity, and is never overcome. Max Miiller 
has designated the religion of the Sanskrit- speaking Indians, the 
system of the Vedas, as henotheism, by which he means the wor- 
ship of numerous divinities, each of which, however, in the act of 
worship, is clothed with such attributes as imply that the other 
divinities are for the moment forgotten, and which might logically 
abolish them. This is really polytheism with a peculiar monistic 
drift. But Professor W. D. Whitney, than whom there is no higher 
authority on the subject, dissents from this theory, and attributes 
the exalted attributes attached to the particular god at the moment 
of worship mainly to a natural exaggeration. Professor Whitney 
declares that " there is no known form of rehgious faith which 
presents a polytheism more pure and more absolute than the Vedic 
religion." ^ Whether monotheism entered into the ancient religion 
of Egypt is an unsettled debate. It is maintained by Renouf that 
the Egyptian monuments and literature exhibit a mingling of 
monotheism and polytheism ; that there was a conception of one 
God with sublime attributes — an idea connected, however, with 
the notion of a pluraHty of divinities and with debased super- 
stitions. The sublime conception, Renouf contends, was the most 
ancient. Mr. G. Rawlinson takes the same position, holding that 
there was a purer, esoteric faith, the rehgion of the educated class, 
alongside of the polytheism and idolatry in which the multitude 
were sunk.^ On the contrary, Lepsius thinks that the Egyptian 
religion took its start in sun-worship. Other Egyptologists would 
make sun-worship intermediate between an earlier monotheism 
and polytheism. The religion of the Greeks, as all know, was 
a polytheism in which there is a struggle toward unity in the lofty 
image of Zeus, as the father of gods and men, and as the fountain 
of law and right, which is found in the writings of Sophocles and 

1 Revue de VHistoire des Religions, torn. vi. (1882), No. 5, p. 143. 

2 The Religions of the Ancient World, p. 29. 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 375 

of his contemporaries. Turning to a much later religion, — the 
religion of Mohammed, — we find passages in the Koran which 
imply not only a genuine faith in the Supreme Being, but also the 
ascription to him of certain exalted moral attributes. " Your God 
is one God : there is no God but he, the merciful, the compassion- 
ate." ^ Paradise is " for those who expend in alms in prosperity 
and adversity, for those who repress their rage, and those who 
pardon men. God loves the kind. Those who, when they do a 
crime, or wrong themselves, remember God and ask forgiveness 
of their sins, — and who forgives sins save God ? — and do not 
persevere in what they did, the while they know, these have their 
reward, — pardon from their Lord," etc.- 

Passages like these, taken by themselves, would give a higher 
idea of Mohammed's system than a wider view warrants. Those 
other representations must be taken into account, in which the 
holiness of God is obscured, the prophet's fierce resentment is 
ascribed to the Lord, and a sensual paradise promised to the 
faithful. "And when ye meet those who misbeheve — then strike 
off heads until ye have massacred them, and bind fast the 
bonds. . . . Those who are slain in God's cause. . . . He will 
make them enter into paradise."^ But the higher elements in 
the religion of Mohammed, strongly as they seized upon his faith, 
did not begin with him. Kuenen argues that he knew little of 
Abraham, and that the identification of his creed with that 
ascribed to the patriarch, which is found in the Koran, was an 
afterthought.'* However imperfect his knowledge of Abraham's 
history was, the name of the patriarch was familiar to him. It is 
of more consequence to remember that his main tenet was the 
familiar belief of the Jews, which a circle of Arab devotees 
probably still cherished. The religion of Mohammed was a 
fanatical crusade against polytheism and idolatry, first among the 
Arabs, and then in the degenerate Christianity of the Eastern 
Church. The ultimate source of all that is good in Mohammed's 
movement is the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, which 
he did not refuse to acknowledge, little as he really knew of 
their contents, and far as he was from comprehending the 

1 The Koran, Professor Palmer's translation, ch. ii. [150], (vol.i. p. 22). 

2 Ibid., c. iii. [125], [130], vol. i. p. 63. 

3 Ibid., c. xlvii. [5], (vol. ii. p. 229). 

* Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions, p. 12, sec. 4, 



3/6 THE GR JUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

prophetic or Messianic element of the Old Testament religion, or 
its fulfilment in the Gospel. Mohammedanism has one grand idea 
of the Old Testament, the idea of God, but with the attribute of 
holiness largely subtracted, and divested of the principle of prog- 
ress^ which issued, in the case of the religion of Israel, in the 
kingdom of Christ, the universal religion of Jesus. 

History indicates that polytheism, whatever be its origin, tends, 
in the case of nations that advance in intelligence, to some species 
of monotheism. Professor Whitney finds " unmistakable indica- 
tions of the beginnings of a tendency to unity in the later Vedic 
hymns." ^ The Graeco-Roman religion had resolved itself, in the 
minds of Plutarch and many of his contemporaries, into a behef 
in one Supreme Being, with a host of subordinate divinities. In 
the second century of the Christian era, under the influence of 
philosophy, God was conceived of as one Being ; and the minor 
deities were thought of, either as representing the variety of his 
functions, or as instruments of his providence. This was the 
mode of thinking in cultivated classes. The belief and rites of 
the common people remained unaltered. But here a most im- 
portant fact must be brought to the attention of the reader. We 
find that the tendencies to unification, although they may beget a 
sort of monotheism which lingers for a time, commonly issue in 
Pantheism. They do not stop at monotheism as a finality. 
Nature still holds the spirit in its fetters. If it is not a multitude 
of deities, more or less involved in natural forces and functions, it 
is nature as a whole, figured as an impersonal agency, into which 
deity is merged. It was so in the ancient classical nations. The 
esoteric philosophy and theology did not continue deistic ; it lapsed 
into Pantheism. 

The religions of India are a notable illustration of this apparent 
helplessness of the spirit to rise above nature, above the realm of 
things finite, to the absolute and personal Being, from, whom are 
all things. One of the most learned and trustworthy of the 
expositors of the religions of India says, "India is radically 
pantheistic, and that from its cradle onwards." ^ When we 

'^ Revue de VHistoire des Religions, torn. vi. (1882), No. 5, p. 143. 

2 Barth, The Religions of India, p. 8. Barth's work still retains its value, 
although not a recent pubhcation. Among recent works, two volumes by 
Professor Edward Hopkins are especially characterized by accurate learning 
and by fairness: The Religions of India (1895); I'>idi(^ Old and N'eiv 
(1901) : (" Yale's Bicentennial Publications"). 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 377 

examine the Brahmanical religion as it was developed on the 
banks of the Ganges, we find a thoroughly pantheistic system. 
Emanation is the method by which finite things originate. Brahma 
is the impersonal essence or life of all things : from Brahma, gods, 
men, the earth, and all things else, proceed. This alienation from 
Brahma is evil. The finite soul can find no peace, save in the 
return to Brahma, — the extinction of personal consciousness. 
The laws of Manu close with the sentiment, " He who in his own 
soul perceives the Supreme Soul in all beings, and acquires 
equanimity toward all, attains the highest state of bliss." The 
Stoics, and Spinoza, and occasional sayings of Emerson are 
anticipated in this Hindoo sentence. All the horrors of transmi- 
gration, and. all the torments of Brahmanical asceticism, have a 
genetic relation to this fundamental pantheistic tenet. 

Buddhism is the religion which at present is most lauded by 
those who would put Christianity on a level with the heathen creeds. 
We may pass by the perplexing inquiry as to how much the life of 
its founder is history, and how much in the narrative is myth. That 
Buddha was an earnest man, deeply struck with a sense of the misery 
of the world, and anxious to do good, may be safely concluded. 
He looked upon the multitude with heart-felt compassion. 
The sages hoped for eventual happiness only through painful and 
life-long asceticism. The common people were enslaved to unin- 
telligible ceremonies, and held down under the tyranny of the 
caste-system. That he made large sacrifices of worldly good in 
pursuit of his benevolent purpose is equally certain. That the 
moral precepts which he enjoined, and the moral spirit which he 
recommended and practised, are marked by a purity and benevo- 
lence scarcely to be found in the same degree elsewhere, outside 
of the pale of Christianity, is evident. Yet nothing can be better 
adapted to impress one with the immeasurable superiority of 
Christianity to non-Christian systems in their best forms than a 
close attention to the Buddhistic system. 

What now according to Buddha, or Qakyamuni, is the cause, 
and what the cure, of the ills of life? His theory is embodied 
in the four principles: (i) Existence is always attended with 
misery; to exist is to suffer; (2) The cause of pain is desire, 
which increases with its gratification ; (3) Hence the cessation or 
suppression of desire is necessary ; (4) There are four stages in 
the way to this result, — four things are requisite. These are, first. 



3/8 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

an awakening to the consciousness that to exist is to be miserable, 
and to the perception that misery is the fruit of desire or passion ; 
secondly, the escape, through this knowledge, from impure and 
revengeful feeHngs ; thirdly, the getting rid successively of all 
evil desires, then of ignorance, then of doubt, then of heresy, then 
of unkindliness and vexation. When the believer has reached 
the fourth stage, he is ready for Nirvana. What is Nirvana? 
What is the blessed goal where all self-disciphne reaches its 
reward? It is the extinction of personal being. It is annihila- 
tion. That this is the doctrine of Buddha, scholars generally hold.^ 
The same scholars who declare this to be the outcome of the 
latest and most thorough investigations also find that Nirvana was 
held to be attainable in this life ; ^ that is, this term was applied by 
early Buddhist teachers to the serenity which is reached by the 
saint here. But this does not imply that there is a continuance of 
individual being beyond death.^ Buddha himself steadily refused 
to give an answer to the question. The most competent scholars 
rightly conclude that he did not believe in an existence after 
death. So far as Nirvana is the extinction of those evil passions 
and the deliverance from that grievance which deprives us of 
peace, it is even attainable in this life. But the sole blessing that 
comes with death is the full and final parting with the weariness 
of existence.^ It is sometimes thought that transmigration is 
inconsistent with the denial that the soul is a substantial entity. 
But the pantheistic theory as seen in the Brahmanical system, 
while it subtracts personality from the soul, may hold that the 
finite being which we call " the soul " may be embodied not once 
only, but an indefinite number of times. Yet to exist as distinct 
from the Absolute, or as self-conscious, is the evil of evils. But 
while some have thought that Buddha himself may possibly have 
held to the "vaguely apprehended and feebly postulated ego,'^ 
passing from one existence to another, — a doctrine found in the 

1 SeeT. W. Rhys Davids's article, " Buddhism," Encycl. Brit., vol. iv. p. 434; 
Barth, p. no; Tide's OutlUies of the History of Religion, etc., p. 35; Koep- 
pen. Die Religion d. Buddha, i. 306; Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, p. 45. 

'^Wci^'?>V>zy\di%'s Lectures on Origin and Growth of Religion, etc., pp. 100, 253. 

^ Ibid., p. 10 1. 

* Hopkins, The Religions of India, p. 321. "Orthodox teaching in the 
ancient order of Buddhists inculcated expressly on its converts to forgo the 
knowledge of the being or non-being of the perfected saint." — Oldenburg, 
Buddha, His Life, His Doctrine, His Order, p. 276. 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 379 

Sanskrit books of the North,^ — without question, the accepted 
doctrine of the sect was, that the Buddhist, strictly speaking, does 
not revive, but another in his place, — the " Karma," which is the 
reunion of the constituent qualities that made up his being. " Such 
is the doctrine of the entire orthodox literature of Southern 
Buddhism." ^ " Buddhism does not acknowledge the existence of 
a soul as a thing distinct from the parts and powers of man which 
are dissolved at death ; and the Nirvana of Buddhism is simply 
extinction." ^ " Buddha believed neither in God nor soul, but he 
believed, and every form of his church believed, in the transmigra- 
tion of character, as an entity, with a new body, a theory which has 
nothing to do with heredity, with which it has been compared." * 
The Buddhist aspires to Nirvana, to the end that he may avert 
the pains of transmigration from another, his heir or successor. 

Dr. Fairbairn, in a just appreciation of the excellences of Buddha's 
teaching, styles him "a transcendent theist."^ He points out that 
" nothing could be farther than the soul or system of the Buddha 
from what we mean by Pantheism." It is explained that his denial 
of Brahmanisms and his altruistic ethics are in their spirit theistic* 
And it is explained further that " Buddha's theory was pessimistic, 
for it conceived being as sorrow, and the discipHne he enforced 
was a method for the cessation of personal existence." ^ Buddhism 
may be described as the apotheosis of the ethical personality — 
the deification was none the less complete that the religion knew 
no God, though it was a result that at once paralyzed the intellect 
and quickened and satisfied the heart.^ 

It is in this method of self-discipline, and in the tempers of 
heart which are inculcated, that the exceptionally attractive points 
of Buddhism are comprised. Chastity, temperance, patience, and, 
crowning all, universal charity are to be earnestly cultivated as the 
indispensable means of redemption from the dread of transmigra- 
tion and from the pains of existence. His personal traits were the 
most potent cause of the spread of his influence. 

It is obvious what are the merits of Buddhism and their limits. 

1 Earth, pp. 112, 113. 

^Burnouf, Introd., p. 507 (Earth, p. 1 12). 

* Rhys Davids, EncycL Brit.^ vol. iv. p. 434, where the proofs are given. 

* Hopkins, India Old and New, p. 138. 

^ Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 243. 
' Ibid.y p. 121. 



380 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

Buddha was no avowed antagonist of the traditional Brahminical 
rehgion. He set on foot no crusade against caste. Warfare against 
Brahmanism and caste arose later. There is a common family 
likeness between his doctrine and the contemporary speculations 
of the philosophy of the Brahmans. In a tone lacking the justly 
sympathetic spirit of Dr. Fairbairn, an eminent scholar has said : 
"Atheism, scornful disregard of the cultus and tradition, the 
conception of a religion entirely spiritual, a contempt for finite 
existence, belief in transmigration, and the necessity of deliver- 
ance from it, the feeble idea of the personality of man," — these 
are among the features found in Buddhism and the Upanishads.-^ 

The monkish system, which became so popular after the death 
of Buddha, was as blighting in its influence on intellectual develop- 
ment, and as adverse to the well-being of men, as anything in the 
Brahmanical creed or rites. The first monasteries had for their 
aim study and the cultivation of the spirit of which Buddha 
was an example. Monasticism, as Kuenen has remarked, is an 
excrescence in the Christian system. The '*Son of man came 
eating and drinking." "There could be no Buddhism without 
^ bhikshus ' — there is a Christianity without monks." " That which 
in one case constitutes the very essence of the religion and cannot 
be removed from it, even in thought, without annulling the system 
itself, is in the other case . . . the natural but one-sided develop- 
ment of certain elements in the original movement, coupled with 
gross neglect of others which have equal or still higher right to 
assert themselves." ^ 

Buddha was the great apostle of Pessimism, since he sought to point 
out a virtuous method of getting rid of existence. The Brahman 
sought to save himself; Buddha sought, also, to save others. But 
from what? From the ills of conscious existence. It remains a 
literal truth that " Buddha believed neither in God nor soul." It is 
literally a system without God and without hope, save the negative 
hope of deliverance from personal hfe. He invited the victims of 
sorrow and terror to imitate him with no promise of escape from 
annihilation ! Contrast the invitation of Him who said, " Come unto 
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest " ! 
This rest was in fellowship with him, involving in it communion 
with the heavenly Father, without whom not a sparrow falls, who 
makes all things work together for good to them that love him, and 
1 Earth, p. 115. ^ Kuenen, p. 306. 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 38 1 

opens the gates of heaven at last to the soul that has been trained 
by earthly service for the higher service and unmingled blessedness 
of the hfe to come. 

In expressions in the New Testament on the burdens that attend 
our life on earth there is a radical unlikeness to the pessimism of the 
founder of Buddhism. The teleology of Buddha holds out no 
prospect of a ripeness of character which leads to a perfection of 
conscious blessedness, the life everlasting. Buddhism, vigorous at 
its birth, "has been smitten with premature decrepitude. . . . Some 
are at times fain to regard Buddhism as a spiritual emancipation, a 
kind of Hindoo Reformation ; and there is no doubt that in certain 
respects it was both." But it created an institution " far more 
illiberal, and formidable to spiritual independence," than the caste 
system. " Not only did all the vitality of the Church continue in a 
clergy living apart from the world ; but among this clergy itself the 
conquering zeal of the first centuries gradually died away under the 
influence of Quietism and the discipline enforced. ... All bold- 
ness and true originality of thought disappeared in the end in the 
bosom of this spirit-weakening organization." ^ The secret of its 
decadence in India, its original home, was its own degeneracy. It 
became at length " as much a skeleton as was the Brahmanism of 
the sixth century. As the Brahmanic belief had decomposed into 
spiritless rites, so Buddhism, changed into dialectic and idolatry 
(for in lieu of a god the later church worshipped Buddha), had 
lost now all hold upon the people. The love of man, the spirit of 
Buddhism, was dead, and Buddhism crumbled into the dust." ^ 

What is the real significance of Buddhism as an historical phe- 
nomenon? It is the most powerful testimony ever given to the 
burden that rests on human nature. From its millions upon mill- 
ions of adherents there arises an unconscious call for the help 
which their own system cannot provide. Buddhism, in its inmost 
purport, is a part of the wail of humanity in its yearning for 
redemption. It is an eloquent witness to the need of Revelation. 
It is a comment on the text, " No man knoweth the Father but 
the Son." 

The parallelisms existing, or supposed to exist, between passages 

in the Buddhistic and other Hindoo religious writings and passages 

in the gospels have occasioned much discussion. These relate to 

sayings and to historical circumstances. They are reviewed care- 

1 Barth, p. 137. 2 Hopkins, The Religions of India, p. 342. 



382 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

fully and with studious impartiality by Professor Hopkins.^ As 
concerned with facts, the *' parallels " are in Buddhism. These 
are more than fifty in number. Of these, only five are of a date 
to lend even plausibihty to the idea of a borrowing on the 
side of Christianity. One of the most noted of them is that per- 
taining to the miraculous conception. In the story of the miracu- 
lous birth of Buddha the early texts declare that his mother is not 
a virgin. The notion of an indebtedness of Christianity to the 
Buddhistic tale and child-cult is on other accounts void of prob- 
ability. In general, the evidence bears out the conclusion of 
Professor Hopkins, " Where the parallels make borrowing seem 
probable, as in the case of miracles and legends not found in 
other religions, and striking enough to suggest a loan, the historical 
evidence is strongly in favor of Christianity having been not the 
copyist but the originator." ^ So far as sayings are concerned, the 
supposed parallels belong to Krishnaism, the type of religion of 
which Krishna, a local leader, imagined to be an incarnation of 
Vishnu, was the originator. The literature here is later than the 
time of Buddha. In Krishnaism the imagined loan to the gospels, 
as regards the Synoptics, is evidently destitute of substantial proof. 
The same conclusion is justified upon due examination in the case 
of John. This Gospel was of a character " that made it pecuharly 
suitable to influence the Hindoo divines, who transferred from it 
such phrases and sentiments as best fitted in with the conception 
of Krishna as a god of love." ^ Christian teaching in the first 
centuries had various avenues of access and of influence on the 
thought of India and its religious guides. Professor Hopkins, 
while anxious to avoid any statement not well attested, says, " I 
must confess that the ingrowth of Christian ideas may have been 
deeper than we can state with certainty, and that, for example, 
the little band of early Christians in South India may have been 
instrumental in fashioning the lofty ideals of some of the noble 
religions which we know existed in after time and the influence 
of which in their turn may still be potent among the sects of 
to-day." * 

Christianity received from its parent, the religion of Israel, the 
truth of a living, personal God — a God not merged in nature, 

1 The elaborate discussion bearing the title " Christ in India," in India Old 
and New, covers pp. 120-168. 

"^ India Old and New ^ p. 143. ^ Ibid., p. 158. '^ Ibid., p. 168. 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 383 

but the Author of nature. The personaHty of God gives to man 
his true place. Man is a person ; and religion, instead of being 
a mystic absorption of the individual, is the communion of person 
with person. Immortality is personal. The guaranty and evidence 
of it is in the relation of man to God, and in the exalted position 
which is thereby conferred on man. This guaranty becomes a 
joyous assurance, when the believer is conscious of being spiritually 
united to Jesus Christ, and a partaker of his life. The great idea 
of the kingdom of God is the object of aspiration and of effort — 
the goal of history. The life that now is, instead of being branded 
as a curse, is made a theatre for the realization of a divine purpose, 
and the school for a state of being for which, when rightly used, 
it is the natural precursor. 

Through such characteristics as these, Christianity is fitted to 
be the religion of mankind. None of the systems which have 
aspired to this distinction has the remotest hope of attaining it. 
None of these systems contains a single element of value, which 
is not found in its own place in the Christian system. On the 
contrary, there is nothing in Christianity which forms any perma- 
nent barrier to its acceptance by any race or nation. No other 
religion has in an equal degree proved its adaptedness to be the 
religion of the world. It addresses itself, not to a single people, 
nor to any branch of the human race exclusively or specially, but 
to mankind. The apostles were directed to carry it " to every 
creature." The idea of the brotherhood of the race becomes in 
Christianity a realized fact. Appealing to a common religious 
nature, a common consciousness of sin and of the need of help, a 
common sense of the burden of sorrow and mortality, and offering 
a remedy which is equally adapted to all, Christianity shows itself 
possessed of the attributes of a universal religion. Being, on the 
practical side, a religion of principles, and not of rules, it enters 
into every form of human society and every variety of individual 
character, with a renovating and moulding agency. 

How shall the rise of such a religion be accounted for? We are 
pointed back to Hebrew monotheism. But here we meet with a 
phenomenon altogether unique, both in its origin and in its effects. 
That the doctrine of Moses was not derived from the religion of 
Egypt, scholars of every type of theological belief unite in affirm- 
ing. The question whence Moses derived his idea of God, says 
Wellhausen, "could not possibly be worse answered than by a 



384 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

reference to his relations with the priestly caste of Egypt and their 
wisdom. It is not to be believed that an Egyptian deity could 
inspire the Hebrews of Goshen with courage for the struggle 
against the Egyptians, or that an abstraction of esoteric specula- 
tion could become the national deity of Israel." ^ ^' Amongst stu- 
dents of Israelite religion," says Kuenen, " there is not, as far as 
I know, a single one who derives Yahvism " — the worship of 
Jehovah — "from Egypt, either in the strange manner hit upon 
by Comte, or in any other." ^ "It may be confidently asserted," 
says Renouf, " that neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of 
their ideas from Egypt." ^ The Decalogue commands the exclu- 
sive worship of Jehovali. The spirituality of the conception is 
carried out in the prohibition of all images and representations of 
him. The substratum of the "Ten Words" is ascribed to Moses 
by Ewald and many other critics. The additional prohibition is 
considered by many to be of a later date. Dillmann is of the con- 
trary opinion : " In the post-Mosaic period," he says, " at least 
in the central sanctuary of the whole people, and in the temple of 
Solomon, the unrepresentable character of Jehovah through any 
image was a recognized principle. The worship of an image on 
Sinai (Exod. xxxii.), in the time of the judges, in the kingdom of 
the ten tribes, does not prove that a prohibition of image-worship 
was not known, but only that is was very hard in the mass of the 
people, especially of the northern tribes, which were more under 
Canaanite influences, to bring this law to a recognition ; and for 
centuries, in fact, it was a subject of strife between a stricter and 
a laxer party, since the latter only forbade an image of a false god, 
the former forbade every image of Jehovah hkewise." * The 
prophets Amos and Hosea do not insist on the exclusion of 
images as if this prohibition were anything new. We need not 
inquire whether the non-existence of other deities was expressly 
asserted in the Mosaic teaching or not.^ Since Moses did not 
derive the idea of God from the Egyptian theology, both the 
historical records and the probabilities of the case testify that 
it was the God of the forefathers whose existence, and relations 

1 Encycl. Brit, art. " Israel," vol. xiii. p. 400. 

2 National Religions and Universal Religions, p. 64. 
^ The Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 254. 

* Die Bucher Exodus u. Leviticus, p. 209. 
^ On this subject, see Oehler, ii. 155. 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO OTHER RELIGIONS 385 

to the people, were by him brought home afresh to their con- 
sciousness. The entire work of Moses as a founder admits of no 
historical explanation, without the assumption of a higher religion 
before, such as, according to Genesis, belonged to the fathers ; but 
such a higher religion necessarily implies personal media, or rep- 
resentatives. "Advances in religion link themselves to eminent 
personalities ; and the recollection of them is commonly kept up 
in the people who come after who have been gathered into unity 
as sharers in common of their faith." Hence the narrative of the 
faith of Abraham derives a strong historical corroboration from 
the faith and work of Moses.^ Whatever difference may exist on 
the question whether belief in the existence of other gods outside 
of Israel, inferior to Jehovah, Hngered among the people after the 
age of Moses, all allow that, as early as the eighth century, the 
conception of Jehovah as the only existing God was proclaimed 
by the prophets in the clearest manner. How unique was this 
monotheism ! Other nations somehow made room for the gods 
of foreign peoples. They brought them into the Pantheon, or 
they gave them homes within their own proper boundaries. Not 
so with Israel. Jehovah was God, and there was no other. And 
he was a holy God. In this grand particular, the conception was 
distinguished from heathen ideas of divinity. How shall this idea 
of Jehovah, so peculiar and so elevated, be accounted for? The 
notion of a Semitic tendency to monotheism has a very slender 
foundation, and would lead us to expect the rehgion of Jehovah 
to arise in Babylon or Tyre as soon as among the people of Israel. 

If we leave the question of the origin of Hebrew monotheism, 
how shall it be explained that it did not sink down, when it had 
once arisen, into Pantheism, as was the fact in other religions, — 
for example, in the religion of the Hindoos, and in the philosophy 
of the Greeks, which Lord Bacon calls " the pagan divinity " ? 
How did this unique and extraordinary faith keep up its vitality, 
age after age, in the presence of seductive types of heathenism, 
and in the midst of pohtical disintegration and ruin? How came 
the light, when it had dawned, to go on increasing to the perfect 
day, instead of fading out, as elsewhere, in the gloom of night? 

Leaving these problems, too, unsolved, how was it that the 
Hebrew monotheism held within itself the seeds of so great a 
future? Assailants of the Old Testament religion never tire of 

^ See Dillmann, Die Genesis, pp. 228, 229. 
2C 



386 THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

dwelling on the alleged narrowness of Jewish theology, and on the 
selfish and unsocial character of their religious theory. It cannot 
be denied that, in spite of the injunctions of the prophets, who 
insisted that the election of Israel and its advantages were for a 
service to be rendered, the consciousness of being a Chosen 
People often engendered an arrogant and intolerant spirit toward 
the nations less favored ; that is, the bulk of mankind. Yet what 
was the actual outcome? It was the religion of universal love, 
of the equality of men before God, of the fatherhood of God and 
the brotherhood of the race. It was the religion of Jesus. " By 
their fruits ye shall know them." The Old Testament was the one 
book with which Jesus was familiar. In the teaching of the Old 
Testament the apostles were steeped. The originality of Jesus 
is not more marked, and his advance beyond all previous doctrine, 
than is the organic relation of his instruction and work, of the 
type of character which he exemphfied and enjoined, to the Old 
Testament ideas. The God whom we worship, if we believe in God, 
is the God of the fathers of Israel, of Moses, of Samuel, of Isaiah, 
and of David, of Paul, and of John, — even the Father of the Lord 
Jesus Christ. There is no break in the unity of the religious con- 
sciousness from that far remote day when the progenitor of Israel 
believed in God, and was lifted above the life of sense by his com- 
munion with the Invisible. With this religious consciousness, the 
ethical development up to its consummation in the impartial jus- 
tice and unselfish love of man as man, which is the rule of Christ, 
is inseparably connected. With it is connected the ever unfold- 
ing dictates and corollaries of this principle, by which wrongs and 
miseries are more and more discerned and lessened. 

How shall such a religion, founded on such a conception of 
God, be accounted for? Who that believes in God can find it 
incredible that it springs from his revelation of himself, — a self- 
revelation, consummated in Christ? An examination of other 
rehgions, instead of shaking the faith of a Christian, tends to 
fortify it. 



APPENDIX 

NOTE I (p. 23) 

When the possession by man of a rational spirit, self-conscious and 
with the power of self-motion, is recognized, the key is found to the 
ultimate source of religion. On this question, one method of inquiry 
is to inspect the cults and customs of savage and half-civilized races. 
This appears strange in such as bring the history of religion under the 
law of evolution. One would expect them to look for the essential 
nature of religion, not in its rudimental forms, but rather through a 
study of its mature development. The juxtaposition of all sorts of 
religion, in quest of a common characteristic, is not the true method 
of science. Yet this is the method of Mr. Spencer. His course would 
be to discard whatever is distinctive in the various creeds and cults of 
the race, and to fasten on the residuum, an abstract idea.^ 

The traditional view that the human race sprang from one pair, — a 
view not treated with disfavor by certain eminent naturalists, — and 
the question as to the mental and moral characteristics of " man 
primeval," are topics which there is not space here to discuss. Exag- 
gerations on the last point, so common formerly, — as when the famous 
preacher, Robert South, said that Aristotle was the rubbish of Adam and 
Athens the ruins of Paradise, — are no longer heard. The deism of the 
last century made a full enlightenment respecting God, which theology 
ascribed to a revelation to the primitive man, to be the product of his 
own natural powers. This hypothesis is extinct ; and if there were any 
sufficient warrant for that of a primitive revelation, it would still imply 
a religious capacity in the recipient of it. Religion cannot be created 
outright by a bare communication of facts respecting the supernatural. 
To be sure, the possibility of lapses, in the course of history, from a 
higher plane of religious knowledge, is sustained by facts and must be 
conceded. Yet the survival in various advanced types of religion of ideas 
and rites not essentially diverse from notions and cults now prevalent 
in rude tribes proves that an upward movement has been a widespread 
experience of mankind, whatever were the precise characteristics of the 
earliest religion. 

^ For a criticism of this faulty method, see Dr. E. Caird, The Evolution of 
Religion^ vol. i. pp. 46 seq. 

387 



388 APPENDIX 

One thing is certain, that all speculations respecting the origin of 
religion which refer it purely to an empirical or accidental source are 
superficial. The theory that religious beliefs spring from tradition fails 
to give any account of their origin, to say nothing of their chronic con- 
tinuance and of the tremendous power which they exert among men. 
The notion that religions are the invention of shrewd statesmen and 
rulers, devised by them as a means of managing the populace, probably 
has no advocates at present. It belongs among the obsolete theories 
of free-thinkers in the last century. How could religion be made so 
potent an instrument if its roots were not deep in human nature ? 
Ti7nor facit deos is another opinion. Its most interesting ancient 
expositor was Lucretius. Religion is supposed, on this view, to arise 
from the effect on rude minds of storms, convulsions of nature, and 
other phenomena which inspired terror and were referred to super- 
natural beings. But why should the thought of such beings spring up 
in this connection 1 It is a shallow hypothesis, which, for one thing, 
overlooks the fact that impressions of this kind are fleeting. They 
alternate, also, with aspects of nature of an entirely different character. 
If nature is terrific, it is likewise gracious and bountifiil. Divinities 
having these mild traits appear in early mythologies. A favorite view 
of a school of anthropologists at present is that religion began in 
fetich-worship and arose by degrees through the worship of animals to 
a conception of loftier deities conceived of as being in human form. 
For this generalization the historical data are wanting. Even where 
fetich-worship exists, the material object itself is not the god. Rather 
is it true that the stick or stone is considered the vehicle or embodi- 
ment of divine agencies acting through it. " The external objects 
of nature never appear to the childish fantasy as mere things of sense, 
but always as animated beings, which, therefore, in some way or other, 
include in themselves a spirit." ^ 

The "philological theory" has been elaborately set forth by Max 
Miiller. It traces mythological beliefs to mistakes in interpreting 
language. Gender-terminations of words and phrases, implying life 
and motion, at first figuratively meant, but later taken literally, are 
supposed to account for the conceptions and tales of the heathen 
religions. This theory labors under difficulties too numerous and 
formidable to be overcome.^ One of them is that the obtuse interpre- 
tation of metaphors is attributed not to barbarous, but to civilized men. 

Animism, the natural tendency to personalize the objects and 
operations of nature, is the philosophy most accepted. But the term 
" animism " is employed by Tylor, one of its well-known advocates, to 

^ Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, p. 319. 

2 A recital of these objections may be read in A. Long's article, " Mythology," 
in Encycl. Bi'it., vol. xxvii. p. 139. 



APPENDIX 389 

comprise not only the worship of deceased human beings, but also 
the worship which springs from the ascription of spiritual life to material 
objects in the world about us, and to the natural phenomena which 
science assumes to connect with impersonal forces. Spencer, on the 
contrary, would confine the beginnings of religion to the worship of 
deceased ancestors. 

No doubt animism, the natural impulse to personalize the objects and 
operations of nature, is a principal factor in solving the problem. 
Uncivilized peoples project into things, animate and inanimate, the life 
and personal qualities which belong to men as these are known to them. 
As such peoples may believe in their own kinship with animals and 
even with plants, and as they have faith in magical arts, irrational 
as well as savage myths arise. These often survive and then mingle 
with myths of a higher caste, which spring up in times less ignorant 
and brutal. Herbert Spencer, on the contrary, would confine the begin- 
nings of religion to the worship of deceased ancestors, and from this 
would deduce the whole variety of religious notions and cults. 

Ancestor-worship itself he would explain by a dream-theory and a 
ghost-theory combined.^ The " primitive man," who is so far off as to 
give room for any number of guesses about him, mistakes his shadow 
for another man, the duplicate of himself. Whether he makes the 
same mistake about every rock and wigwam from which a shadow is 
cast, we are not told. His image seen in the water gives him a more 
definite idea of his other self. Echoes help still more in the same 
direction. Then there is the distinction between " the animate," or, 
rather, animals, and " the inanimate." Here Spencer rejects what the 
soundest writers on mythology hold, that the personifying imagination 
of men, who as regards reflection are children, confounds the inanimate 
with the living. The lower animals, dogs and horses, do not ; and 
is man below them in knowledge ? This position of Spencer is charac- 
teristic of his whole theory. If man were on the level of the dog or the 
horse, if he were not conscious, in some degree, of will and personality, 
then, like them, he might never impute to rivers and streams and trees 
personal life. Dreams, according to Spencer, create the fixed belief 
that there is a duplicate man, or soul, that wanders off from the body : 
hence the belief that the dead survive.^ Naturally they become objects 
of reverence. So worship begins. Epilepsy, insanity, and the like 
confirm the notion that ghosts come and go. A human personality, 
it is held, is behind a tempest, an earthquake, and every unusual 
phenomenon. Temples were first the tombs of the dead. Fetiches 
were parts of their clothing. Idols were their images. The belief 
somehow arises that human beings disguise themselves as animals. 

^ The Principles of Sociology , vol. i. ch. viii. seq. 
2 First Principles, 4th ed., p. 31. 



390 APPENDIX 

Animal-worship is explained, in part, in this way, but mainly by a 
blunder of " the primitive man." There was a dearth of names ; human 
beings were named after beasts ; gradually the notion springs up that 
the animal who gave the name was the parent of the family. Plants 
with strange intoxicating qualities are assumed to be inhabited by 
ghosts. Plant-worship is the result. 

Spencer, at the outset, in his First Principles^ favored the idea that 
religion sprang out of a mistaken application of the causal principle 
to the explanation of nature and of man. The later theory sketched 
above is what he conceives that the evolution-doctrine demands. He 
differs, as will be perceived, from the archaeologists who make religion 
start with fetichism. He frowns upon those evolutionists who allow, 
what they, like most scholars, feel compelled to hold, that among the 
Aryans and Semites religion cannot be traced back to ancestor-worship. 
Such evolutionists, Mr. Spencer observes, are not loyal to their theory. ^ 
The circumstance that they cannot find facts to sustain the theory, so 
far as these branches of the human race are concerned, ought not to 
be allowed to shake their faith. He considers his opinion as the proper 
tenet of agnostic orthodoxy. 

The ingenious mode in which this theory is wrought out scarcely 
avails even to give it plausibility. The mythical sense attached to 
names of animals and things inanimate is not made a characteristic of 
an earlier stage of intelligence, but of stages of a later date. The transi- 
tions from point to point, especially from the lower to the higher types 
of religion, have an artificial aspect. The resort for evidence is not to 
history, the source whence, if anywhere, satisfactory evidence should be 
derived. The proofs are ethnographic. They consist of scraps of infor- 
mation respecting scattered tribes of savages, mostly tribes which now 
exist. In this way phenomena may, no doubt, be collected, which lend 
some support to the speculation about shadows, dreams, and ghosts. 
But a generalization respecting savage races cannot be safely made from 
miscellaneous data of this sort. That " the primitive man " was a savage 
is an assumption made at the outset. That he was unlearned, uncivil- 
ized, is one thing. That he was a fool, that he was not much above the 
brute, is an unverified assertion. Degeneracy is not only a possible fact, 
it is a fact which history and observation prove to have been actual in 
the case of certain peoples. The worship of the objects of nature, as 
far as can be ascertained, was not as a rule preceded by the worship of 
ancestors. It is a false analogy which Mr. Spencer adduces from the 
worship of saints in the Church. This practice did not precede the 
worship of God ; primitive Christianity did not come after medieval. 

It is a fatal difficulty in the way of the dream- and ghost-theory, 
as anything more than a partial and limited account of the genesis of the 

^ The Principles of Sociology , vol. i. p. 313. 



APPENDIX 391 

religions, that it is not sustained, but is confuted, by historical investi- 
gation. The most prominent gods of India were, in the most ancient 
records, personified natural phenomena. ^ This is true of the sky-gods. 
The sky-father, or father-sky, is not only preserved in India, but also in 
the religions of Greece and Rome, where Zeus and Jupiter are transferred 
from his Indian name. There were ghost-demons and ghost-gods, but 
there were also invisible spirits which were distinguished from them, 
and deities under various categories having no relationship to them, 
either of descent or of transference. 

In explaining the rise of religion, one would expect Mr. Spencer to 
say something of the great founders whose teaching has been so potent 
that eras are dated from them, and multitudes of men for ages have 
enrolled themselves among their disciples. One would think that Con- 
fucius, Buddha, Mohammed, with whatever of peculiar illumination each 
possessed, should be counted among the powerful agencies concerned in 
developing the religions of mankind. But the evolution doctrine, in the 
phase of it which Mr. Spencer advocates, is cut off from doing justice 
to the influence of individuals. If religion had no deeper roots than are 
assigned to it in Mr. Spencer's theory, it could never have gained, much 
less have maintained, its hold upon men. The offspring, at every step, 
of error and delusion, it would have been short-lived. Mr. Spencer has 
presented valuable suggestions in the study of the origin of supersti- 
tions ; but his view as a whole is a signal instance of the consequences 
of adhesion to a metaphysical theory, with only a partial survey of facts, 
and a failure to penetrate to the deeper principles of human nature. 
Even as an acconnt of the genesis of certain superstitions, his theory 
needs to bring in as one element a sense of the supernatural, a yearning 
for a higher communion. 

There is a wide interval between hypotheses of the character noticed 
above and the more elevated theory that religion arises from the percep- 
tion of marks of design in nature. But even this falls short of being a 
satisfactory solution of the problem. Not to dwell on the facts, that the 
adaptations of nature impress different minds with unequal degrees of 
force, and that of themselves they fail to exhibit the infinitude and the 
moral attributes of deity, it is evident that the phenomena of religion 
require us to assume a pro founder and more spiritual source to account 
for them. This must be found in deeper perceptions and aspirations 
within the human soul. 

A capital defect in many of the hypotheses broached to account for the 

1 Professor Edward Hopkins, India Old and New, pp. 93 seq. This is a late 
as well as thorough exposition of the subject. Sir Henry Maine, who recog- 
nizes the prevalence of ancestor-worship, remarks that the theory attached to 
it " has been made to account for more than it will readily explain." — Sir 
Henry Maine, Dissertations on Early Law and Custom^ vol. i. p. 69. 



392 APPENDIX 

origin of religion is that they make it the fruit of an intellectual curi- 
osity. It is regarded as being the product of an attempt to account for 
the world as it presents itself before the human intelligence. It is true 
that religion as a practical experience contains an ingredient of knowl- 
edge ; yet it is a great mistake to regard the intellectual or scientific 
tendency as the main root of religious faith and devotion. Belief in 
God does not lie at the end of a path of inquiry of which the motive is 
the desire to explore the causes of things. It arises in the soul in a 
more spontaneous way, and in a form in which feeling plays a more 
prominent part. " Those who lay exclusive stress on the proof of the 
existence of God from the marks of design in the world, or from the 
necessity of supposing a first cause for all phenomena, overlook the fact 
that man learns to pray before he learns to reason ; that he feels within 
him the consciousness of a supreme being and the instinct of worship 
before he can argue from eifects to causes, or estimate the traces of wis- 
dom and benevolence scattered through the creation." ^ 

In connection with the foregoing observations a few additional 
remarks on the nature and origin of myths will not be out of place. 
A myth is, in form, a narrative, resembling in this respect the fable, 
parable, and allegory. But, unlike these, the idea or feeling from which 
the myth springs, and which, in a sense, it embodies, is not reflectively 
distinguished from the narrative, but rather is blended with it ; the 
latter being, as it were, the native form in which the idea or sentiment 
spontaneously arises. Moreover, there is no consciousness on the 
part of those from whom the myth emanates that this product of their 
fancy and feeling is fictitious. The fable is a fictitious story, contrived 
to inculcate a moral. So the parable is a similitude framed for the 
express purpose of representing abstract truth to the imagination. 
Both fable and parable are the result of conscious invention. In both, 
the symbolical character of the narrative is distinctly recognized. 
From the myth, on the contrary, the element of deliberation is utterly 
absent. There is no questioning of its reality, no criticism or inquiry 
on the point, but the most simple, unreflecting faith. A like habit 
of feeling we find in children, who, delighting in narrative, improvise 
narrative. It is difficult for us to realize that childlike condition of 
mind which belonged to the early age of nations, when the creations 
of personifying sentiment and fancy were endued, in the faith of those 
from whom they sprang, with this unquestioned reality. It is almost 
as difficult as to reproduce those states of mind in which the funda- 
mental peculiarities of language germinate : peculiarities in respect to 
which the philological explorer can only say that so mankind in their 
infancy looked upon things and actions. But there is no doubt as to 
the fact that the mythologies had this character. They are frequently, 

1 Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought, p. 115. 



APPENDIX 393 

— at least they were, — the pure creation of the mythopcEic faculty; 
the incarnated faith and feeling of a primitive age, when scientific 
reflection had not yet set bounds to fancy. Science brought reflection. 
The attempt of Euemerus to clear early mythical tales of improbabilities 
and incongruities, and to find at the bottom a residuum of veritable 
history, and the attempts of both physical and moral philosophers 
to elicit from them an allegorical sense, are, one and all, the fruit of that 
scepticism which culture brought with it, and proceed upon a totally 
false view of the manner in which the myths originate. When these 
theories came up, the spell of the old faith was already broken. They 
are the eiforts of rationalism to keep up some attachment to obsolete 
beliefs, or to save itself from conscious irreverence or popular dis- 
pleasure. A state of mind had arisen wholly different from that which 
prevailed in the credulous, unreflecting, childlike period, when a com- 
mon fear or faith embodied itself spontaneously in a fiction which was 
artlessly taken for fact.i 

As we have implied, back of the authentic history of most nations 
lies a mythical era. And whenever the requisite conditions are present, 
the mythopceic instinct is active. The middle ages furnish a striking 
example. The fountain of sentiment and fancy in the uncultured 

^ K. O. Miiller's Prolegomena zu einer ivissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825) 
did much to open the way to an understanding of the true nature of the 
myth. The lectures of Schelling on the Introduction to Mythology (see 
Schelling's Sammtliche Werke, II. Abth. i.) still retain their value as an able 
and elaborate discussion. Schelling examines at length the various theories 
which have been proposed to account for the origin of mythology, including 
those of Heyne, Hermann, Hume, Voss, Creuzer, and others. He disproves 
all the irreligious hypotheses and expounds in an interesting and profound 
way his own view, which is the same in spirit as that of Miiller, although the 
latter, in the opinion of Schelling (p. 199), has not applied his theory to 
the first origination of the conceptions of the gods, but rather to their mytho- 
logical doings — the mythological history. Schelling applauds the remarks 
of Coleridge on this subject, and says that he gives the latter a dispensation 
for the alleged free borrowing from his writings, in return for the single word 
which Coleridge has suggested as a proper description of myths. They are 
not ^//ifgorical, says Coleridge, but tautegotica.]. Schelling maintains that 
the primitive religion of mankind was " relative monotheism," that is, the 
worship of one God who is not known in his absolute character. Thence 
polytheism arose, so that this one God was only the first of a series. 

Among the expositions of the general subject, the sixteenth and seventeenth 
chapters of the first volume of Grote's History of Greece have not lost their 
interest. Mr. Grote shows the spontaneity that characterizes the origin 
of myths. In some important respects his view is defective. No theory 
is complete which omits to take account of the religious nature of man and 
his aspirations after communion with God. 



394 APPENDIX 

nations of Europe divaricated, so to speak, into two channels, — the 
religious myth and the myth of chivalry. When we have eliminated 
from the immense mass of legendary history which forms the lives 
of the saints what is due to pious frauds (though these presuppose a 
ready faith), and what is historical, being due to morbid or otherwise 
extraordinary psychological states, and, if the reader so .pleases, to 
miracle, there still remain a multitude of narratives involving super- 
natural events, which last have no foundation whatever in fact, but 
were yet thoroughly believed by those from whose fancy, enlivened and 
swayed by religious sentiment, they emanated. 

NOTE 2 (p. 49) 

Commenting on Paley's illustration of the watch, Huxley, in his Lay 
Sermons^ writes as follows : — 

" Suppose only that one had been able to show that the watch had 
not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the 
modification of another watch, which kept time but poorly ; and that 
this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called 
a watch at all, seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands 
were rudimentary ; and that, going back and back, in time we came at 
last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole 
fabric. And imagine that all these changes had resulted, first, from 
a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely, and, secondly, from 
something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the 
direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all these in other 
directions, and then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument 
would be gone ; for it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thor- 
oughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a 
method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of 
the direct application of the means appropriate to that end."^ 

Here we have the supposition of indefinite variation, which Huxley 
himself, as we shall see, is not prepared to affirm. Not to dwell on this 
point, we have, in the case supposed, " a revolving barrel " at one end 
of the line and a watch with its complex apparatus, by which it is fitted 
to record time, at the other. At the outset the barrel, with its inherent 
capacities, requires to be accounted for, in connection with that some- 
thing which tends to one or another diverging path. The "surrounding 
world" is not outside of the system of things to which the production 
of the watch is due. The actual end evinces that " the means appro- 
priate to that end took part in it." The passage in the text (p. 49) 
which is cited from Huxley exposes the fallacy of the foregoing para- 
graph. As to a tendency to indefinite variation, see above in this work, 

pp. 51 seq. 

1 Lay Sermons, pp. 330, 331, 



APPENDIX 395 

In his interesting book on the crayfish, Huxley says : — 

" Under one aspect the result of the search after the rationale of 
animal structure thus" — i.e. by the discovery in animals of arrange- 
ments by which results, of a kind similar to those which their [men's] 
own ingenuity effects through mechanical contrivances, are brought 
about — " is Teleology^ or the doctrine of adaptation to purpose. Under 
another aspect it is Physiology. '■'^'^ 

" The body of the animal [the crayfish] may be regarded as a factory, 
provided with various pieces of machinery, by means of which," etc., 
. . . " to which material particles converge . . . from which they are 
afterward expelled in new combinations" (p. 84). 

One of the most remarkable differences between " the living factory 
and those which we construct" is that "it not only enlarges itself, 
but, as we have seen, it is capable of executing its own repairs to a very 
considerable extent." ^ 

" If all that we know concerning the purpose of a mechanism is 
derived from observation of the manner in which it acts, it is all one 
whether we say that the properties and the connections of its parts 
account for its actions, or that its structure is adapted to the perform- 
ance of those actions." ^ 

If the terms are given their proper significance in the foregoing 
extracts, their purport is theistic. 

Happily we have statements of Huxley which imply something above 
mechanical agencies, and, especially in later utterances, ethical proposi- 
tions occur which are not consistent with agnostic denials that leave 
no room for freedom and responsibility. In the Lay Sermo7is is the 
comparison of life to a game of chess. " The calm, strong angel," who 
is the player on the right side, " pays the highest strikes with overflow- 
ing generosity," and "would rather lose than win."* In the Lecture 
on Descartes it is said of those who hold that there is nothing in the 
world but matter and force and necessary laws, " I decline to follow 
them." " Laws and moral precepts," Huxley affirms, " are directed to 
the end of curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual 
of his duty to the community." " Goodness or virtue demands self- 
restraint." Still more significant in the right direction are expressions 
in the Romanes Lecture, one of Huxley's latest productions, where, 
speaking of the struggle of conscience with the cosmic forces, he 
remarks that "ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is neces- 
sarily at enmity with its parent." ^ 

The change from the position of Huxley, as expressed in the declara- 
tion that " it is utterly impossible " to prove " that anything whatever 

^ The Crayfish^ etc., p. 47. ^ JUd.^ p. 86. ^ Jhid^^ p. i^y. 

* Lay Sermons, Addresses, etc. (187 1 ), p. 31. 

^ See Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (1894), pp. 81-85. 



396 APPENDIX 

may not be the effect of a material and necessary cause," to the posi- 
tion that " our one certainty is the existence of the mental world," that 
necessity is not a physical fact but an "empty shadow of my own 
mind's throwing," shows a leaning no longer to materialism or " agnostic 
monism," but to spiritualism and a "duality in unity." It is not the 
former conception of man as a conscious automaton. ^ 

NOTE 3 (p. 50) 

Darwin often found it difficult to avoid giving way to the evidences of 
design in nature. In the book on the Fertilization of Orchids is this 
passage (which is retained in the Revised Edition (1877), p. 351) : 
"The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever 
increasing force with the conclusion that the contrivances and beautiful 
adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a 
slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation or natural selec- 
tion of those variations which are beneficial to the organism under the 
complex and ever varying conditions of life, transcend in an incompar- 
able degree the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile 
imagination of the most imaginative man could suggest." When the 
Duke of Argyll, in conversation, referred to the wonderful contrivances 
for certain purposes in nature which Darwin had brought out in this and 
other works, Darwin said : " '• Well, that often comes over me with over- 
whelming force; but at other times,'" and he shook his head vaguely, 
adding, " '• it seems to go away.' " ^ 

Darwin's scepticism respecting final causes is sometimes associated 
with the interpretation for which theology is in some degree responsible, 
that design in nature is solely for the end of being beneficial to man, 
or, at least, exclusively for some impression upon human observers. It 
is interesting to notice that in nature he was ready to believe in the 
wisdom of a contrivance which appeared unwise. Thus, in the first 
edition of the Fertilization of Orchids (1862), he says (p. 359) : " It is 
an astonishing fact that self-fertilization should not have been an habit- 
ual occurrence. It apparently demonstrates to us that there must be 
something injurious in the process." Later (1877), in the correspond- 
ing paragraph (p. 293), he explains that the perplexity is removed by 
the discovery of the good effects that follow, " in most cases, cross- 
fertilization," and by the fact that he had proved that there is " some- 
thing injurious " in the process of self-fertilization. In reference to the 
fruits of design in nature, on the whole, Darwin expresses the belief 

1 This change is lucidly demonstrated by Ward, Naturalism and Agnos- 
ticism, vol. ii. pp. 210 seq. 

2 Good Words, April, 1885; quoted in Darwin's Life and Letters (vol. i. 
p. 285). 



APPENDIX 397 

that " all sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general 
rule, happiness,'' and that " all sentient beings have been so developed, 
through natural selection, that pleasurable sensations serve as their 
habitual guides." ^ Another source of the scepticism which prevented 
the absolute rejection of what he terms " the intolerable thought that he 
[man] and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihila- 
tion after such long-continued slow progress," and the full acceptance of 
theism, despite "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of con- 
ceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including in it his [man's] 
capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of 
blind chance or necessity," is the doubt, the "horrid doubt" as he calls 
it, which, to use his own words, always arises whether the convictions 
of man's mind, which has been developed from the minds of lower 
animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." ^ 

The stumbling-block was the question whether a mind having such an 
origin is competent "to draw such grand conclusions." Of course, 
scepticism from this motive would, if carried out, sap the founda- 
tions of our beliefs generally. We simply follow the example of the 
sincere and noble man in referring to what he styles " the curious and 
lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic taste," " the atrophy of that part 
of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend." The delight 
which he had once felt in poetry and music and fine scenery fades out. 
" The loss of these tastes," he frankly says, " may possibly be injurious 
to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character." ^ Along 
with this loss, the religious sentiment, which had once been deep with 
" higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion," gradually ceased 
to be felt. He might be said, he adds, " to have become like a man 
who has become color-blind, if faith in God and such convictions and 
feeling were universal, like the perceptions of color." ^ It is fair to say 
that religious feelings are as prevalent, and have had as deep a root in 
the race, as are the class of feelings which Darwin styles aesthetic. 



NOTE 4 (p. 56) 

The ancient objection, which is based on the existence of evil, to the 
doctrine of theism concerning the attributes of God is restated by Hume. 
Either God wills to prevent evil, but cannot, in which case he is not 
omnipotent ; or he can prevent evil, but will not, in which case he is 
not benevolent ; or he neither can, nor wills, to prevent evil, in which 
case he is neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Theologians in times 
past dwelt on the benefits resulting from that double manifestation, of 

1 Life and Letters, pp. 279, 280. ^ Lbid., pp. 81, 82. 

2 Lbid., pp. 282, 285. * Lbid., p. 281. 



398 APPENDIX 

which moral evil furnishes the occasion, of both the justice and mercy 
of God. They have gone so far as to propound the doctrine that it is 
good that evil should exist, so far as it actually does exist. In this 
class of theologians belong the great names of Augustine, Aquinas, and 
Calvin. Leibnitz, in his theodicy, defends the thesis that the freedom 
of the creaturely will and the consequent possibility of sin is the indis- 
pensable condition of the best moral system. But even Leibnitz, in his 
thesis that this is the best of all possible worlds, stops short of a dis- 
tinct discrimination, without which the vindication of theism against 
the old objection is incomplete. The possible inconsistency of an 
absolute exclusion of evil from the best moral system by the interposi- 
tion of divine power is one thing ; the prevention of sin by the right 
choices of those guilty of it is another. The proposition, therefore, that 
in any instance it is good that wrong — instead of right — exists, i.e. 
that sin is the necessary means of the greatest good, is unwarranted 
and untenable. The mystery that invests the moral system, regarded 
as universal, and the precise character of its final issues render adverse 
criticism presumptuous, especially in view of the truth that no moral 
being can fail of the true end of his being unless through his own per- 
sistent choice of evil instead of good. The problem of the existence 
and continuance of evil, moral and physical, is discussed in a sound and 
lucid manner by Dr. A. M. Fairbairn, in The Philosophy of the Ch'istian 
Religion (1892). Especially worthy of attention are his observations on 
moral and physical evil as " organically related in the mind of him who 
governs nature and man" (pp. 163 seq.), on a state of suffering, not one 
of probation, but of recovery from lapse, the last word and not Nature's 
(pp. 166 seq.^. The fact of evil, moral and physical, is not to be con- 
sidered by itself, but as coupled with the divine purpose of redemption. 
So far as life is a probation, it is an incidental circumstance, not a chief 
end in the divine system. 

NOTE 5 (p. 66) 

" Pantheism, in one or another of its protean forms, is a way of think- 
ing about the universe that has proved its influence over millions of 
minds. ... It has governed the religious and philosophical thought 
of India for ages. Except in Palestine, with its intense Hebrew con- 
sciousness of a personal God, it has been characteristic of Asiatic 
thought. It is the religious philosophy of a moiety of the human race. 
In the West we find a pantheistic idea at work in different degrees of 
distinctness, — in the pre-Socratic schools of Greece, as in Parmenides ; 
after Socrates, among the Stoics; then among the Neo-Platonists of 
Alexandria, with Plotinus in ecstatic elevation, — a signal representative ; 
again, in a striking form, in Scotus Erigena, who startles us with intrepid 
speculation in the darkness of the ninth century, the least philosophical 



APPENDIX 399 

period in European history ; yet again, with Bruno as its herald, after 
the Renaissance ; and in the seventeenth century the speculative thought 
of Europe culminated in Spinoza''s articulated pantheistic unity and 
necessity. The pantheistic conception was uncongenial to the spirit 
and methods of the eighteenth century, but it is at the root of much 
present religious and scientific speculation in Europe and America. It 
emerges in the superconscious intuition of Schelling : it has affinities 
with the absolute self-consciousness of the Hegelian : it is implied in 
the Absolute Will and the Unconscious Absolute of Schopenhauer and 
Hartmann in Germany, and in England it has affinity with the Unknow- 
able Power behind phenomena of Herbert Spencer. . . . Pantheistic 
science, universal nescience, and theistic faith are three ideals now 
before Europe and the world, with some educated and more half-edu- 
cated thoughts oscillating between the first and the second. Which of 
these three is the most reasonable final conception — the fittest for man 
in the full breadth of his physical and spiritual being? "^ 



NOTE 6 (p. 82) 

Mr. John Fiske, in his posthumous publication, The Life Everlasting 
(pp. 72 seq.)^ refers to the question, " Does correlation obtain between 
physical motions and conscious feelings?" He says that when he first 
asked Tyndal the question, he seemed to think that there must be some 
such correlation. " Herbert Spencer in his First Principles rather cau- 
tiously took the same direction and tried to show how a certain amount 
of motion might be transformable into a certain amount of feeling. . . . 
It is especially worthy of note that in the final edition of First Prin- 
ciples^ published in the year 1900, and in Spencer's eighty-first, he goes 
very far toward withdrawing from his original position. In my Cos?nic 
Philosophy, published in 1874, I maintained that to form the trans- 
formation of motion into feeling or feeling into motion is in the very 
nature of things impossible." " The mass of activities concentrated 
within our bodies . . . shows us a closed circle which is entirely 
physical " (p. 79) . 

NOTE 7 (p. 83) 

" Physical science is the discovery in nature of the principles and 
laws of reason pervading and regulating nature. If these principles 
had been in the reason of man, but not in nature, man could never 
have put them into nature, nor have caused nature to be regulated 
by them. If they had been in nature and not in the reason of man, 
man never could have discovered them nor formed any conception 

^ Professor A. C. Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, pp. 80, 81, 85. 



400 APPENDIX 

of them. And this is only recognizing from a new point of view the 
synthesis of phenomenon and noumenon, which, in contrast to Kant's 
antithesis of them, I have already shown to be essential to all rational 
intelligence. An intelligible object is impossible without an intelligent 
subject. The noumena, or necessary principles and ideas of reason, are 
the unchanging forms in which reality is known by rational intelligence. 
If all that is known by man is phenomenal and not the real being, 
because known in relation to his mind, and the noumenon or real 
being is out of this relation and unknowable by man, then all that 
is known by any mind is phenomenal and unreal because known in 
relation to that mind. Thus we have the monstrous absurdity that 
noumena exist as pure objects out of all relation to all and every 
intelligent mind, that is, pure objects unintelligible to any mind and 
contrary to any and every principle of reason." 

..." Truth has no significance except as some mind is its subject ; 
for truth is the intellectual equivalent of reality. There can be no 
truth or law without a mind, as there can be no perception without a 
percipient and no thought without a thinker. We only delude our- 
selves by hypostasizing either perceptions or thoughts or truths as 
if they were substantial beings. Truths do not float loose about the 
universe, independent of mind. But in the development of man's 
rational constitution he finds himself having knowledge of truths which 
are universal and regulative of all his thinking which transcends his 
experience and condition all the reality which comes under his observa- 
tion. There must be a supreme reason that is the subject and source 
of these truths and in that reason they must be the eternal and 
archetypal principles of all that begins to be." ^ 

..." These principles cannot be peculiar to an individual. I know 
that they are not mine ; I have not created them ; I cannot change them 
nor set them aside. They must be principles of a reason above and 
beyond me, a reason that is eternal, universal, and supreme. Nor can 
they have originated in the evolution of the human race. If they were 
brought into human consciousness by the evolution of the primitive 
man through many generations, yet even while lying germinal and 
unconscious in his undeveloped constitution, they regulate man's 
development itself and direct it in its long progress to conscious 
rationality ; they also regulate the corresponding development of nature 
in accordance with rational laws, and to the realization of rational 
principles and ends. They cannot, therefore, have originated with man, 
either the individual or the race, but must have existed before the 
evolution began, in a reason that is universal and supreme." ^ 

^ Dr. Samuel Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, p. 120. 
2 Harris, Ibid., p. 145. 



APPENDIX 401 

" Even if our categories were purely subjective, it is impossible we 
should ever come to know it ; and the idea of a world of things in 
themselves, apart from the world we know, may easily be shown to 
dissolve in contradictions. A world, real and independent of the 
individual's transient acts of knowledge, is not a world divorced from 
intelligence altogether. The fact, therefore, that a category lives 
subjectively in the act of the knowing mind, is no proof that the 
category does not at the same time truly express the nature of the 
reality known. It would be so only if we suppose the knowing subject 
to stand outside of the real universe altogether, and to come to inspect 
it from afar with mental spectacles of a foreign make. In that case, 
no doubt, the forms of his thought might be a distorting medium. But 
the case only requires to be stated plainly for its inherent absurdity 
to be seen. The knower is in the world which he comes to know, and 
the forms of his thought, so far from being an alien growth or an 
imported product, are themselves a function of the whole. As a P'rench 
writer ^ puts it, " consciousness, so far from being outside reality, is the 
immediate presence of reality to itself and the inward unrolling of its 
riches.'^ When this is once grasped, the idea of thought as a kind 
of necessary evil — Kant really treats it as such — ceases to have even 
a superficial plausibility. Unless we consider existence a bad joke, we 
have no option save tacitly to presuppose the harmony of the sub- 
jective function with the nature of the universe from which it springs." ^ 

NOTE 8 (p. 86) 

The corner-stone of the system of Matthew Arnold, if system it 
could be called, is a conception of God which he not only regards 
as true, and evidently true, but even identifies with the biblical idea 
respecting this fundamental point. His theory may be termed an 
unscientific Pantheism ; or perhaps, inasmuch as he does not profess 
to exhaust the conception of the Deity by his definition, an Agnostic 
Pantheism. In Literature a?id Dogma^ with much, although it can 
scarcely be said with wearisome, iteration he explains that the equivalent 
of God is " the Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." 
One would suppose that we have here a distinct expression of what, 
not lettered persons alone, but the world at large as well, mean by 
'■'■ cause," and designate by this name. But no ! our author warns us 
that such notions belong to " metaphysics," and were quite foreign 
to the simple Israelites. Moreover, we ourselves run off into specula- 
tion the moment we talk of them. There is a Power, a Power exerting 
itself, or being exerted, a Power exerting itself for a particular end, or 
producing a definite effect ; yet it must not be denominated a " cause." 

^ M. Fouillee, in his L Avoliitionnisme des Idees-forces. 
^ A. Seth, Ten Lectures on Theism, pp. 18, 19. 
2D 



402 APPENDIX 

Most people, whether simple or not, would be moved to ask what 
more precise description of cause and causal agency could be given 
than is involved in this favorite phrase of Arnold. In his second 
work, God and the Bible, he makes an elaborate effort to explain 
his remarkable definition of God, and the Israelites' conception of 
him, and to rule out the idea that under the " Power, not ourselves," 
there is included the notion of a being. In this latter work we are 
told that we must not think of " the Power that makes for righteous- 
ness " as inhering in a subject, — this is a misconception ; it is anthropo- 
morphic. Is all that is meant, then, that righteousness is observed, or 
is believed, to be followed by blessedness? Is there nothing but the 
bare fact of a succession of consequent to antecedent, after the manner 
of Hume's theory of causation? More than this is intended. There 
is an " operation " which yields this result. Things are so constituted 
that the supposed effect is produced. It is a " law of nature " like the 
law of gravitation. It is a " stream of tendency." When we speak, 
and when the Israelites spoke, of the " Power that makes for righteous- 
ness " as " eternal," all that is really meant is that righteousness always 
was and always will be attended with blessing. Arnold does not seem 
to be aware that in trying to fence off the conception of being as con- 
nected with the "Power, not ourselves," he does not succeed in escaping 
from what he styles " metaphysics." There is an " operation " left ; 
there is " a perceived energy." The doctrine is simply this : that the 
world — things collectively taken — is such that a certain result, 
namely, blessedness, is sure to be worked out by the practice of right- 
eousness. It falls short of being a dogmatic Pantheism by the added 
statement that we cannot " pretend to know the origin and composition 
of the Power " in question ; we cannot say that it is a person or thing. 
In one place Arnold professes that he will not deny that " the Power " 
is "a conscious intelligence." But ordinarily he treats the conception 
that his "Power" is intelligent as pure anthropomorphism. If it be 
this, why admit it even as a possibility? If Arnold had pondered the 
subject more deeply, he might have perceived that the idea of person- 
ality, when connected with the conception of God, involves no philo- 
sophical difficulty. If by anthropomorphism is meant the limiting 
of God, or making him finite, no such consequence follows from 
personality. 

It is interesting to inquire what becomes of devotion, of what men 
have always meant by prayer and communion with God, when God 
is made to be nothing more than a law of things, "a stream of ten- 
dency." In a foot-note Arnold gives the following answer : " All good 
and fruitful prayer, however men may describe it, is at bottom nothing 
else than an energy of aspiration towards the Eternal, not ourselves, 
that makes for righteousness, — of aspiration towards it and cooperation 
with it." The Eternal, it must be remembered, which is referred to by 



APPENDIX 403 

the use of the pronoun //, signifies no being, — this is expressly dis- 
claimed. " It," " the Eternal,'' is the fact that " righteousness was 
salvation," and will " go on being salvation." " It," " the Eternal," 
is the experienced and expected conjunction of these two things. 
What aspiration towards " it," and co-operation with " it " denote, and 
with what propriety either of these or both together can be taken to 
signify prayer^ in particular supplication which has always been held to 
be the prime essential in prayer, we are left to conjecture. 

Considering the tendencies of the time in the direction of Pantheistic 
thought, it is not a matter for surprise that Arnold should bring forward 
the notion of an impersonal divinity. There is, however, some reason 
for astonishment that he should present his conception as the kernel 
of the Israelites' faith, the living God of whom the Prophets spoke, and 
in praise of whose perfection the Psalms were composed. He admits, 
to be sure, that the Hebrews personified, and could not but personify, 
" the Stream of tendency." Surely it is nothing short of an amazing 
error to regard the personal qualities which the Hebrews attached 
to God as an accidental and separable element in their faith. Take 
away the personality of God, and what basis would have remained for 
that living communion with him, that joy in him, which formed the 
life and soul of the Hebrew religion? Substitute the vague abstrac- 
tions which make up this Pantheistic definition of deity for the desig- 
nations of God in the Prophets and the Psalms, and the frigidity 
and almost ludicrous emptiness that remain, fairly exhibit the Hebrew 
religion as it would have been if its essential contents had accorded 
with our author's idea of it. Not even an intuition is allowed them 
of this imaginary divinity, the connection of righteousness with hap- 
piness, but their knowledge of " it " is described as empirical ; it is 
something found out by experience. '•' From all they could themselves 
make out, and from all that their fathers had told them," they arrived 
at the conclusion that righteousness was the way to happiness. The 
truth is that in the Hebrew mind righteousness was infinitely more 
than a perceived condition of being happy. It was a requirement from 
without, from the Holy One. Their delight was in him. When they 
failed in righteousness, as fail they did, the only hope of happiness was 
through contrition and pardon from God. 

NOTE 9 (p. 93) 

To illustrate adequately, with the emotions connected with it, the 
power of self-accusation, and to show its prevalence, would require a 
copious volume. Poetry and the drama, as well as biographical literature, 
offer endless materials. This is true if every departure from records 
marked by soundness and sanity were to be avoided. Place may be 
given to a single instance. Robert Burns, under date of January, 1794, 



404 APPENDIX 

having given way, under temptation, to unworthy impulses of sensual 
feeling, expresses the self-abasement that follows in the words : " Regret ! 
Remorse ! Shame ! Ye three hell-hounds that ever dog my steps and 
bay at my heels," etc.' Referring to the same occurrence in a letter 
to another person, under date of February 25, 1794, he writes: "Canst 
thou minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest 
to a soul tossed on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to 
guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her ? " 
In another paragraph of the same letter these lines occur — " senses of 
the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with, 
and link us to, those awful obscure realities — -an all-powerful and equally 
beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave." 
These lines also follow : " I know of some who laugh at religion. . . . 
Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion any more than I 
would for the want of a musical ear." — The Works of Burns, Douglas's 
ed., 1877-1879, vol. vi. pp. 65, 118. 

NOTE 10 (p. 167) 

The following extracts from well-known teachers of philosophy ex- 
hibit the trend of psychical science. 

" The one fundamental reality, the actual Being whose characteristics 
are recognized by the categories, whose work is both nature considered 
as the system of material things and also all the spirits of men consid- 
ered in their historical development, is the Absolute Self. And the 
innermost essence of such an Absolute Self is Spirit. From Spirit, then, 
come nature and all spirits ; and in dependence on this Spirit they live 
and develop." ^ 

The essential and real nature of matter, in the full significance of the 
word " ReaHty," is to be known only in terms of the Life of the Spirit. 
That system of interrelated beings which constitutes the world as 
known to man is the " manifestation under the present conditions of 
space and time, of an infinite and eternal spirit."^ 

" The various categories whereby realistic thought constructs reality 
proved to be the bare forms of intelligence, projected beyond intelligence 
and thereby made meaningless. Being, causality, unity, identity, turned 
out to be unintelligible and impossible apart from intelligence. It 
finally appeared that the world of things can be defined and understood 
only as we give up the notion of an extra-mental reality altogether and 
make the entire world a thought-world ; that is, a world that exists only 
through and in relation to intelligence. Mind is the only ontological 
reality. Ideas have only a conceptual reality. Ideas energized by 

1 Professor George T. Ladd, A Theory of Reality, pp. 458, 459. 

2 Ibid,, p. 408. 



APPENDIX 405 

will have phenomenal reality. Besides these realities there is no 
other." 1 

" Historically, it might be described as Kantianized Berkeleianism. 
In itself it might be called phenomenaHsm, as indicating that the outer 
world has only phenomenal reality. It might also be called objective 
idealism, as emphasizing the independence of the object of individual 
subjectivity. It is idealism as denying all extra-mental existence and 
making the world of objective experience a thought-world which would 
have neither meaning nor possibility apart from intelligence. And this 
is the conception to which speculative thought is fast coming. ... In 
this view . . . the mechanical and materialistic view finds a recognition 
of its phenomenal truth, together with an escape from its essential error.'^ '^ 

" From our own point of view the natural has its source and abiding 
cause in the fundamental reality, which is hving will and intelligence ; 
and physical nature is throughout only the form and product of its im- 
manent and ceaseless causality. The question of miracle, then, is not 
a question of natural versus supernatural, nor a question of causality, 
but only a question of the phenomenal relations of the event in question. 
. . . The miracle could only be viewed as an event arriving apart from 
the accustomed order and defying reduction to rule." ^ 

" The habit of looking upon nature as a system of necessary causality 
easily leads to the conception that all phenomena are to be explained 
within the system itself. There must be no interferences or irruptions 
from without under penalty of the speculator's displeasure." * 

" The only definition of nature which criticism will allow is, the sum- 
total and system of phenomena which are subject to law. The defini- 
tion of physical nature is, the sum-total of spatial phenomena and their 
laws. This nature is throughout effect, and contains no causation and 
no necessity in it. . . . But when nature as cause is posited as some 
blind agent or agents, it represents only bad metaphysics."^ 

The Contentio Veriiatis, etc. (London, 1902), in the opening 
chapter (by Rev. N. Rashdall) on "The Ultimate Basis of Theism," 
maintains the proposition that " things cannot be conceived of as exist- 
ing by themselves," that " they exist only for mind " and cannot exist 
" apart from mind,'' but they exist " not for our minds only ; yet that 
things have an objective as well as subjective being, and that, therefore, 
Universal or Divine Mind must have existed ; that the argument from 
causality shows God as willing and not merely thinking the universe. 

Mr. Rashdall holds that " psychical research " may hereafter extend 
farther than has yet been the fact the limits of what may be regarded as 
possible in the category of events which have been denominated mira- 
cles, without any further violation of the laws of nature than is implied 

^ Professor Bowne, Metaphysics, pp. 422, 423. 2 /^j^v,, p. 423. 

8 Ibid., p. 202. * Ibid., p. 263. 6 Ibid., p. 262. 



406 APPENDIX 

in the normal action of the human will. "But," it is added, "there 
is no probability that it will ever reverse the verdict which has been 
passed ' on some other events recorded in the Old and New Testaments.' " 

NOTE II (p. 172) 

The late Professor Huxley, in his Lay Ser7?ions and in his Contro- 
versial Papers, set forth his philosophical opinions. The clever inven- 
tion of the term " Agnosticism " is due to him. In these writings he 
expressed the opinion that what we call mind is a collection or series of 
sensations standing in certain relations to each other, and that this is 
all we know about it. That there is a thinking agent, such as men gen- 
erally suppose to exist when they use the word /, there is no proof. 
There is a uniformity of succession in the sensations which constitute 
the soul, as far as we know anything of it or have any reason to assert 
anything of it ; but there is no freedom of choice, in the sense that the 
circumstances, internal and external, being the same, any different deter- 
mination of the will from that which actually takes place is possible. 
" What we call the operations of the mind," he says, " are functions of 
the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral 
activity." But the brain, like everything else that is alive, is developed 
from protoplasm, the primitive form of living matter. Huxley avows 
that we have no explanation of the way in which life may have origi- 
nated from inorganic matter, but he indicates no doubt that it had this 
origin. The reader would naturally say that we have here a scheme of 
bald materialism. But this imputation is repudiated. He insists that 
we have no knowledge of anything but the heap of sensations, impres- 
sions, feeling, — or by whatever name they may be called. There may 
be a real something without, which is the cause of all our impressions. 
In that case, sensations are the symbols of that unknown something. 
This conclusion Huxley favors, although he is at pains to declare that 
idealism is unassailable by any means of disproof within the limits of 
positive knowledge. The inconvenience is attached to this last alter- 
native, that it really involves the giving up by the idealist of belief in 
anybody, as well as anything, outside of himself. It involves the doc- 
trine which metaphysicians style solipsism. Professor Huxley affirms 
that " our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness 
of the changes that take place automatically in the organism," and that 
" we are conscious automata." Yet in another place he is equally sure 
that " our one certainty is the existence of the mental world ; " the exist- 
ence of " force " and " matter " is nothing more than " a highly probable 
hypothesis." ^ But the " something " of which the brain is a product is 

1 Collected Essays, vol. ix. p. 130. For a searching analysis of Huxley's con- 
ception of psycho-parallelism, or conscious automatism, see Ward, Naturalism 
and Agnosticism, vol. ii. p. 216. The oscillation of Hvixley between a (prac- 
tical) materialism and solipsism is lucidly exposed. 



APPENDIX 407 

unintelligent ; and when the brain dissolves, there is nothing to prove 
that the phenomena of intelligence continue. There is no proof that 
the soul, that is, the series of sensations, does not come to an end. As 
to the existence of a personal God, this is one of the propositions which 
are incapable of being established. " In respect to the existence and 
attributes of the soul, as of those of the Deity,"" says Professor Huxley, 
"logic is powerless and reason silent." As regards the attributes of 
God, — justice, benevolence, and the like, — he indicates no dissent 
from the ''searching critical negation" of Hume. If there be a God, 
he thinks it demonstrable that God must be " the cause of all evil as 
well as all good," — a conclusion which would follow, to be sure, from 
the tenet that man is not a personal agent, spontaneously and freely 
originating his voluntary actions, but is no proper adjunct of the oppo- 
site doctrine. 

In his book on Hume, Professor Huxley refers to the doctrines and 
arguments of Bishop Butler. " The solid sense of Butler," he says, 
"left the Deism of the Freethinkers not a leg to stand upon." But 
Hume, he intimates, has been successful where they failed. Hume does 
not concede what the Deists admitted. In the passage which Professor 
Huxley cites from Hume's Inquiry there is no denial of a supreme gov- 
ernor or of divine providence. Hume's position, or the idea which he 
puts into the mouth of the Epicurean, is that although experience shows 
that a virtuous course of life is attended with happiness, and a vicious 
course of life with misery, yet this experience affords not the least ground 
for expecting consequences of a like kind after life is over. "Every 
argument," says Hume, " deduced from causes to effects, must of neces- 
sity be a gross sophism, since it is impossible for you to know anything 
of the cause but what you have antecedently not inferred, but described 
to the full, in the effect." This sweeping statement rests on the baldest 
empiricism. By parity of reasoning, if we cannot go an inch beyond 
what we have seen, we should have to say of a man who in a long course 
of conduct had acted justly, that we cannot infer in him the existence 
of an established disposition to conform to the dictates of justice in the 
future. However, Hume illogically admits that an expectation of this 
character is valid as far as " the ordinary course of events is concerned." 
His real ground, although it is not openly stated, is that we have no 
proof of a future state of being ; and if he does not reject the belief in 
a supreme governor, and in divine providence as active in the present 
world, his silence on this point springs merely from civility or reserve. 
But it is only necessary to step out of the prison of a narrow empiricism 
to find in the allotments of justice here evidence enough to show that 
there is a just God, and thus to warrant the presumption, if not to justify 
the full belief, that there is a future life and a completion there of a sys- 
tem begun here, but not carried to completion. It is true that Butler's 
arguments in the Analogy are aimed at Deism, and not at Atheism, or 



408 APPENDIX 

Scepticism as to the essentials of natural religion. But it is also true 
that his arguments go farther and effect more than he directly intended. 
This he himself sees and asserts. Whoever will candidly read his 
chapters on Natural Government and Moral Government will find in 
them evidence which points to the conclusion that there is a God, that 
he is just, and that there is a probability of a continuance of the system 
of rewards and punishments in a life beyond this. 

Any one who saw the Cologne Cathedral as it was fifty years ago, half 
built and with a crane in the unfinished tower, would have had no doubt 
as to the plan of the structure or the design that had existed to realize 
it, sooner or later. What would have been said of an onlooker who 
should have denied that there was any evidence of a thought or an 
intention in the contriver of the edifice to do anything more than could 
then and there be seen? 

NOTE 12 (p. 231) 

The use of the "we" begins with Paul's leaving Troas (xvi. 11), and 
continues in the account of his stay at Philippi. It is resumed on the 
return of Paul to Philippi (xx. 5-15), thus raising the presumption that 
the author of these passages had in the interval tarried at that place. 
The remaining passages in which this peculiarity appears are xxi. 1-18, 
xxvii. i-xxviii. 17. Now, what is the explanation of this phenomenon? 
Only two hypotheses are open to discussion among those who accept 
the ecclesiastical tradition and ascribe the book to Luke. The first 
is the ancient and ordinary view that Luke was himself, in these places, 
the attendant of Paul. The second is the hypothesis of Schleiermacher, 
variously modified by other writers, that Luke here introduces, without 
formal notice, a document emanating, as they commonly suppose, from 
Timothy, or, as some have thought, from Silas, and others from Titus. 
The second form of the hypothesis, that Silas wrote the passages in 
question, is supported by no argument worthy of attention, and is fully 
refuted by the circumstance that, in connection with at least one of the 
passages (see Acts xvi. 19-25), Silas is mentioned in the third person. 
But the theory that Timothy is the author of these passages, although 
it was adopted by so able and candid a writer as Bleek, has been, as 
we believe, effectually disproved.^ This theory does not, to be sure, 
militate against the general credibility of the book, or the fact of its 
being composed by Luke. But how stands the evidence in regard to 
it? We read (in Acts xx. 4, 5) : "And there accompanied him [Paul] 
into Asia, Sopater of Berea ; and of the Thessalonians, Aristarchus and 
Secundus ; and Gains of Derbe, a7id Tifnotheus ; and of Asia, Tychicus 
and Trophimus. T/iese going before tarried for us at Troas." If, 

1 The examination of the "Timothy-hypothesis" by Lekebusch (s. 140- 
167) is one of the finest parts of his excellent treatise. 



APPENDIX 409 

under the term " these," all who are named before are referred to, — 
which is the most natural interpretation,^ — the so-called Timothy- 
hypothesis falls to the ground. In connection with this piece of evi- 
dence, it deserves remark that the absence of all detail — the summary 
style of the narrative — in passages directly connected with those under 
consideration, and covering a portion of Paul's career in which Timothy 
bore an equal part, is against the supposition that Luke had at his com- 
mand a diary of this apostoHc helper. The opinion that Titus wrote 
the passages in question lacks definite support. Against it is the cir- 
cumstance that there is no mention of Titus in the epistles of Paul 
written during his first imprisonment, whereas the author of these 
passages accompanied the apostle to Rome. The decisive argument 
against each of these several hypotheses is the misconception of the 
general structure and character of the book which they imply. Were 
it true that the book presents the appearance of being a compilation of 
documents imperfectly fused or combined, — left in a good degree in 
their original state, — it might not unreasonably be assumed that the 
author had taken up a document from another^s pen, leaving in it the 
pronominal feature which we are discussing. This idea of the book 
was a part of Schleiermacher^s theory. But a more thorough exami- 
nation of the Acts has made it clear that, from whatever sources the 
author draws his information, it is one production, coherent in plan, 
its different parts connected by references forward and backward, and 
flowing from a single pen. If Luke here took up into his work a docu- 
ment from another hand, he could not have given it the harmony with 
his own style which it exhibits, without remoulding its form and phrase- 
ology to such an extent as renders it impossible to suppose the rete7itio?t 
of the "we"''' to be artless or accidental. Memoranda from another 
source, if Luke had such, were rewritteji by hi?n ; but this leaves the 
retaining of the "we," with no explanation, an insoluble fact. We 
infer, then, with confidence, that Luke, in these passages, professes to 
speak in his own person. ^ This fact Zeller and other acute Tiibingen 
critics admitted ; and their conclusion was, that whilst the author of 
the Acts, whom they conceived of as writing in the second century, 
used a previously written document, he intentionally left the " we " as 
it stood, — although the document in other parts was materially wrought 
over by him, — in order to produce the false impression that he was the 
contemporary and associate of Paul. This refined fraud is attributed, 

1 See Meyer, ad loc. 

2 There remains, to be sure, the question why Luke does not expressly state 
the fact of his joining Paul, but leaves it to be gathered from this use of the 
pronoun. But this book was written for a private individual. Of the circum- 
stances of Luke's companionship with Paul, Theophilus may have known 
something before. 



410 APPENDIX 

and it is thought necessary to attribute, to the author of the Acts. But 
if we are not prepared to sanction this imputation, the reasonable 
alternative is to accept the testimony of the author concerning himself ; 
that is, to ascribe his work to a contemporary and companion of the 
apostle Paul. 

It is true that in both of his writings, Luke was instructed in part by 
written sources as well as by verbal communications. An instance of 
the former is the opening chapters of the Gospel, which relate to the 
birth and childhood of Jesus, and contain traces of the Hebraic diction 
of a document used in their composition. But the author of these 
books affords abundant evidence of his capacity as a writer. The dedi- 
cation which forms the prologue of the Gospel is marked by an ele- 
gance in its structure and phraseology which has elicited the admiration 
of classical scholars who are most competent judges of its linguistic 
merit. The " we " passages in the Acts are by the same author. This 
fact excludes the theory that they are carelessly taken up from another 
source in the way which this supposition implies. 

NOTE 13 (p. 252) 

A. Resch, Aussercanonische Paralleltexte zu den Evang.^ Heft 4; 
Paralleltexte zu Johannes (1896), pp. 2-4. Resch points out, as he 
thinks, in the liturgy, in the Didache (in cc. ix. x.), not less than 
seventeen allusions to John^s Gospel. When these are sifted by a 
severe criticism there remain proofs not easily to be set aside in the 
style of the liturgy, and in a number of allusions in it to be connected 
with the gospel rather than with a tradition. The conclusion of Resch 
is that the gospel must have contained in itself before the end of the 
first century the substratum of the earliest liturgical product of primitive 
Christianity (p. 4). 

Resch considers that the earliest reference to the gospel, the name of 
John being used, is given in the Coptic-Gnostic work, codex Bruce (ed. 
Schmidt), a.d. 160 (Resch, p. 24). The list of references which Resch 
finds in Justin contains, when strictly but fairly revised, much material 
to be approved. But it is needless at present to argue for the use of 
John by Justin. It is conceded. The time has gone by when, to use 
the words of Professor J. H. Thayer, one of "the framers of hypotheses " 
was "driven to say that the doctrine of John was borrowed from Justin. 
Sydney Smith . . . had a rural neighbor who was persuaded that the 
hundred and fourth Psalm was a plagiarism upon a devotional compo- 
sition of his own." — The Biblical World, vol. xix., No. 4, April, 1902, 
p. 254. 

NOTE 14 (p. 254) 

After explaining that the accounts which constituted the materials at 
the basis of the first three Gospels did not originate in any design 



APPENDIX 411 

to give a connected account of the life or the public ministry of Christ 
as a whole, Neander proceeds as follows: "John's Gospel, the only 
consecutive account of the ministry of Christ, could have proceeded 
from none other than the beloved disciple on whose soul the image of 
Christ had made the deepest impress. It could not have emanated from 
the soul of any man of the second century. We cannot even imagine 
any man of that century so little affected by the controversies (Gegen- 
siitze), and so far exalted above them. Not in an age when everything 
was broken up into antagonisms, from which not even the attempts at 
mediation could escape, was it possible for such a product to arise, which 
bears in it no trace either of the stamp of the religious materialism or 
anthropomorphism or the one-sided intellectualism which characterized 
that period. How mighty the man must have been in relation to a time 
so far beneath him who could bring forth from his own mind such an im- 
age of Christ! And this man, too, in a time which had so few superior 
minds, remained in the deepest obscurity ! Such an one, who was com- 
petent and must have felt himself called to accomplish the highest 
achievement of his time if he had come out openly and unmasked, must 
make use of so pitiful an artifice in order to smuggle in his ideas! . . . 
Strange that a man who wanted to secure faith in his inventions should, 
in the chronology and topography of the life of Christ, give the lie to 
the universal tradition of the church of his time instead of conforming 
toit!"i 

NOTE 15 (p. 269) 

The suggestion of Haupt relative to the occasional group by the 
fourth Evangelist, of kindred sayings of Jesus on different occasions, 
after the manner of Matthew, deserves much more attention than it has 
received from those who think that they find instances of a broken con- 
nection in the Evangelist's reports. If such a disconnection could be 
shown, this would be a not improbable solution of the difficulty. This 
is favored in the essay by Rev. N. L. Wild in the Coiitentio Veritatis^ 
on "The Teaching of Christ" (pp. 105-167). After saying that the 
fourth Evangelist has made a careful choice among the facts of a wide 
tradition, he adds : " There would seem to be everywhere a conscious 
grouping of the sayings according to subject-matter rather than to cir- 
cumstance. The fragmentary and occasional utterances have been 
fused by memory and reflection with the long discourse," etc. (p. 156). 
This hypothesis is here carried much farther than it is applied by Haupt. 

One of the ablest of modern theologians, Rothe, conceived that his 
own mode of conceiving of the Trinity had support from a supposed 
lack of harmony between the expressions of Jesus respecting his unity 
with God, recorded in John's Gospel, and certain expressions of the 
Evangelist himself on the same subject. As bold in speculation as he 
was devout in faith and piety, Rothe broached the opinion that the con- 
1 Lebenjesu (ed. 5), p. 10, Engl, transl. of ed. 4, p. 6 (revised). 



412 APPENDIX 

ception of a preexistent divine hypostasis was an idea of the apostle 
John, and also of the apostle Paul, and the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, which was suggested to them in a current widespread Jewish 
theological conception, and secured to them a natural solution of the 
mystery of the unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus, in which they 
fervently believed ! ^ It is obvious that theories like these referred to 
above have no claim to credence unless the exegetical premises on 
which they rest are fully verified. 

NOTE 1 6 (p. 272) 

"Peter," the name attached, from its significance, to the disciple 
" Simon," is the name by which, more and more, Simon came to be 
designated in the churches as we see from the New Testament writings. 
St. Paul (as in Gal. ii.) speaks of him as " Peter," using also its Hebrew 
equivalent, " Cephas." If there is truth in the suggestion that the phrase, 
"whom Jesus loved," is probably the rendering of a single Aramaic 
word, signifying " beloved " or something equivalent, and was applied 
by Jesus to John, and became a more or less usual designation of the 
apostle, the use of it in the fourth Gospel would have an additional 
explanation. 

NOTE 17 (p. 280) 

See, in John ii. 12, Dr. Dwight's note in the translation of Godet's 
Coni7ne7itary . The passage in John reads, " After this he [Jesus] 
went down to Capernaum, he and his mother, and his brother, and his 
disciples ; and there they abode not many days." The bare fact of this 
visit is stated with no assigning of a motive for it, or of anything that 
occurred. To make anything out of this statement but a historical recol- 
lection is a desperate undertaking. 

NOTE 18 (p. 289) 

A learned and fair-minded scholar wrote thus, in the closing period of 
his life, in a letter : "' On the genuineness of John my opinion remains 
unchanged. Many of the embarrassments I think (are greatly aggra- 
vated by) misconception as to the nature of the gospels in general, and 
of that one in particular, and the consequent application to it of false 
historical requirements which it was not intended to meet." — Professor 
J. Henry Thayer, in The Biblical Worlds vol. xix., No. 4, April, 1902. 

NOTE 19 (p. 305) 

Yet the tradition underlying the synoptic Gospels is inadequate to 
account for the fulness with which the teaching of Christ's divinity was 

1 Rothe's exposition of his theory is presented at length in his Dogmatik, 
Th. i., especially on pp. 106 seq. 



APPENDIX 413 

developed in the apostolic church. The words of Weizsacker (in 1864) 
are still worth citing : " The strong apostolic faith which has assured to 
Christianity its permanent existence in the world can be explained 
only on the assumption that the life of Jesus stood on such a lofty plane 
as the fourth Gospel permits us to discern. We have every reason to 
suppose that this derivation of the belief in the higher nature of Jesus, 
from his own words and deeds, sprang from a historical conviction of 
the writer himself. For this delineation of Jesus exactly corresponds to 
the mighty elTect produced by the whole personality, and is necessary 
in order to explain how the faith in this person so soon became the 
essence of Christianity." ^ — American Journal of Theology^ vol. ii., 
No. I, January, 1898. 

" Although the first three gospels contain no explicit assertion of the 
doctrine, the personage they portray forbids his classification with ordi- 
nary men, and leaves so unique and exalted a conception of his relation 
to the Father, that the explicit declarations of the fourth Gospel awaken 
no surprise in the ordinary reader. In fact, the old assertion of the 
critics, that the fourth Gospel presents a very different personage from 
the Messiah of the first three, is now, I believe, generally abandoned." 
— Letter of Professor J. Henry Thayer, Biblical World, vol. xix., No. 4, 
April, 1902. 

NOTE 20 (p. 320) 

The school of which Strauss was the most prominent representative 
supported their destructive criticism by sophistical reasoning. The aim 
was to convict the Gospels of inconsistency and contradiction to such 
an extent as to make them untrustworthy, and to render the life of Jesus, 
beyond the most general outlines, utterly obscure and uncertain. One 
of the Evangelists was used to disprove the statement of another ; and 
the second, in turn, was impeached on the authority of the first. The 
first Life of Christ by Strauss, his principal work, is full of examples of 
this circular reasoning. But, besides this transparent vice of logic, in 
the treatment of the details of the history, there was a flagitious disre- 
gard of the sound and acknowledged principles of historical criticism. 
Variations, however innocent, were magnified into an irreconcilable dis- 
cordance. Peculiarities in the narratives, such as occur in the most 
authentic historical writers, were imputed by Baur and his followers to 
contrivance. At the present time, the ascription of discreditable motives 
to the New Testament historians is decidedly less common. But falla- 
cious reasoning from diversities in their narrations is far from being 
unusual. All who pursue historical studies, all who take notice of tes- 
timony in courts, or even of ordinary conversation, know how many 
occasions there are for varying the form of a narrative, besides a want 

^ Uniersuchung, pp. 287 seq. 



414 APPENDIX 

of knowledge, or of honesty in the narrator. The desire of brevity 
leads to the modification of the features of a transaction in the report 
of it. To give prominence to one element, or aspect, of the story, the 
order of circumstances may be changed. For the sake of making an 
event intelligible to a particular person, or class, or to give graphic force 
to the account of it, something may have to be added or, subtracted. 
Thus a diversity of form may be produced, which yet involves no error. 
An unknown circumstance may be the missing link which unites testi- 
mony that is apparently discordant. The justice of these remarks, and 
the fallacy of the method of criticism referred to, are best illustrated by 
examples drawn from ordinary history. As one instance, we may refer 
to two passages, in the last volume of President John Adams's Letters, 
which were written with an interval of little more than a year between 
them : — 

(A) To William Tudor (B) To H. Niles 

QuiNCY, 5 June, 1817. Quincy, 14 June, 1818. 

Mr. Otis, soon after my earliest ac- After my return from Europe, I 

quaintance with him, lent me a sum- asked his daughter whether she had 

mary of Greek Prosody, of his own found among her father's manuscripts 

collection and composition, a work of a treatise on Greek Prosody. "With 

profound learning and great labor. I hands and eyes uplifted, in a paroxysm 

had it six months in my possession be- of grief, she cried, " Oh ! sir, I have 

fore I returned it. Since my return not aline from my father's pen. I have 

from Europe, I asked his daughter not even his name in his own hand- 

whether she had found that work among writing." When she was a little calmed, 

her father's manuscripts. She answered I asked her, "Who has his papers? 

with a countenance of woe that you may where are they?" She answered, 

moreeasily imagine that I can describe, "They are no more. In one of those 

that "she had not a line from her unhappy dispositions of mind which 

father's pen; that he had spent much distressed him after his great misfor- 

time, and taken great pains to collect tune, and a little before his death, he 

together all his letters and other papers, collected all his papers and pamphlets, 

and in one of his unhappy moments, and committed them to the flames, 

committed them all to the flames." I He was several days employed in it." 
have used her own expressions. 

Suppose that these two narratives, instead of being from the pen of a 
modern writer, had been found in the Gospels by a critic of a familiar 
type, the first of them being in one Evangehst, and the second in another. 
What a field for suspicion ! What confident hypotheses should we have 
for the explanation of the phenomena in question ! We should be told 
that document B is a product of exaggeration, founded on the simple 
story in A. The "countenance of woe," in A, is turned into "eyes 
uplifted" and a "paroxysm of grief," in B. The reply of the daughter 
is broken up into separate parts for " dramatic effect." The circum- 
stance that " pamphlets " as well as " letters " and " papers " are men- 



APPENDIX 415 

tioned among the things destroyed, is an addition from the fancy of the 
second writer, or is an accretion in '• the JtYY»;/<'/ evangelical tradition." The 
general view as to the relation of the two documents is confirmed be- 
yond a question by the fact that the destruction of the papers is said in 
A to have been accomplished in "' one of his unhappy moments," while 
B makes it the work of " several days." A makes the collection of 
these materials for the flames occupy a prolonged period ; B thinks that 
the impression would be more startling to represent the conflagration 
itself as long in duration. But why does B omit the statement that the 
book of Prosody had been " six months " in the hands of the writer 
at a previous time ? Obviously, because the disappointment at its de- 
struction would be softened by the circumstance that Mr. Adams had 
already perused the work ; and this would clash with the intention of 
the writer of B, who will paint the calamity in the liveliest colors. We 
appeal to any one who is conversant with modern critical works upon 
the Gospels, if this representation is not a fair parody of the procedure 
of many of them in their handling of these writings. And these con- 
clusions are often announced with the assurance proper to mathematical 
certainty. As it happens, in the present case, we know that both docu- 
ments are from one hand, the hand of a writer of scrupulous veracity. 
The same fact is narrated in the one briefly, in the other more in detail. 
Both, considering the compass of each, and the end for which they 
were written, are accurate. When, in the first letter, Mr. Adams says 
that he has " used her own expressions," he does not mean to be under- 
stood as giving everything that she said, or the precise order in which 
her answers were spoken. 

There is a familiar story of the way in which Sir Walter Raleigh is 
said to have been impressed with the uncertainty of historic narratives. 
This feeling was inspired by the contradicting accounts which he heard 
from eye-witnesses of a fracas which he had himself seen from his win- 
dow in the Tower. The difficulty of getting at the exact tmth as to 
minor circumstances was naturally inferred. Whether the story be true 
or not, there is likewise another important custom that may be sug- 
gested by it to the historical student. Seemingly discordant details 
may spring from the varying perspective of different reporters, the eflfect 
of which the reader or hearer is often not competent to weigh. 

Let the reader take up any important event in ancient or modern 
history, which has been described by several writers, even in cases when 
they were eye-witnesses, and not unobservant or dishonest, and he will 
find variations in matters of detail, which, to a great extent at least, 
might disappear, were the whole transaction presented to our view, and 
which, in any event, do not affect the substance of the narrative. 

The death of Cicero is described by Plutarch and Appian, and is no- 
ticed also by Dion Cassius, Livy, and others. We set in parallel columns 
the two principal accounts : — 



4i6 



APPENDIX 



Plutarch, Vita Ciceronis 

But in the meantime the assassins 
were come with a band of soldiers, 
Herennius a centurion, and Popilius 
[Laenas] a tribune whom Cicero had 
formerly defended when prosecuted 
for the murder of his father. Find- 
ing the doors shut, they broke them 
open, and Cicero not appearing, and 
those within saying they knew not 
where he was, it is stated that a youth, 
who had been educated by Cicero in 
the liberal arts and sciences, an eman- 
cipated slave of his brother Quintus, 
Philologus by name, informed the 
tribune that the litter was on its way 
to the sea through the close and 
shady walks. The tribune, taking a 
few with him, ran to the place where 
he was to come out. And Cicero, 
perceiving Herennius running in the 
walks, commanded his servants to set 
down the litter; and stroking his chin, 
as he used to do, with his left hand, 
he looked steadfastly upon his mur- 
derers, his person covered with dust, 
his beard and hair untrimmed, and 
his face worn with troubles. So that 
the greatest part of those that stood 
by covered their faces whilst Heren- 
nius slew him. And thus was he 
murdered, stretching forth his neck 
out of the litter, being now in his 
sixty-fourth year. Herennius cut off 
his head, and, by Antony's command, 
his hands also, by which the Philippics 
were written; for so Cicero styled 
those orations he wrote against An- 
tony, and so they are called to this day. 



Appian, de Bellis Civ. IV. xix. xx 

While now many people ran about 
here and there, inquiring if Cicero 
had been seen anywhere, and some, 
out of good-will and compassion for 
him, said : " He has already sailed 
and is out upon the sea," a shoemaker, 
a client of Clodius, the most bitter 
enemy of Cicero, pointed out the right 
way to Lsenas, the centurion, who had 
a few soldiers with him. Laenas hur- 
ried after, and, at the sight of the 
servants, whom he saw to be of a 
greater number than his following, 
and prepared for resistance, made use 
of a soldier's stratagem, and called 
out : Centurions who are behind, 
hasten forward ! By this means the 
servants, under the idea that more 
were coming, were struck with a panic 
(^KaTair\dyT](xav). And Laenas, al- 
though he had once gained a cause 
by the aid of Cicero, dragging his 
head out of the litter severed it from 
the body, or rather, from want of 
skill, sawed it off, since he struck the 
neck three times. At the same time 
he cut off the hand with which Cicero 
had written those speeches against 
Antony as a tyrant, to which, after the 
example of Demosthenes, he gave the 
name of Philippics. 



It will be observed that Plutarch states that it was a freedman of 
Quintus, named Philologus, who told the pursuers of Cicero what path 
he had taken. Appian, on the other hand, says that it was a shoemaker, 
a client of Claudius. Plutarch (with whom Livy agrees) says that 
Cicero stretched his head out of the litter; Appian says that Laenas 
pulled it out. Plutarch says that Herennius cut off the head ; Appian 
that it was done by Laenas, awkwardly, in three blows — by sawing rather 
than cutting. Plutarch says that his hands were cut off, and Livy that 



APPENDIX 417 

the head was fastened to the rostrum between the two hands. Appian's 
statement is, that the hand was cut off which had written the Philippics, 
— that is, the right hand. Appian states that the servants of Cicero 
were dismayed by the shout of Laenas, which implied the presence of a 
strong force near. But Plutarch informs us that Cicero directed the 
litter to be set down ; and Livy adds to this that he commanded the 
bearers of it to make no resistance.^ Dion states not only that it was 
Lsenas who cut off the head, but that he kept the skull near to a gar- 
landed image of himself, in order that he might have the credit of the 
deed.^ 

That memorable scene in English history when Oliver Cromwell dis- 
persed the Long Parliament, and locked the door, has been described 
by Whitelocke, Algernon Sidney, and Ludlow, the two former of whom 
were present, and the last, who was in Ireland, derived his information 
from eye-witnesses. There are various points of difference in these 
three narrations. For instance, Whitelocke says that Cromwell led a 
file of musketeers in with him, leaving the rest at the door and in the 
lobby. Ludlow says nothing of the introduction of the soldiers into the 
room where the house was sitting, until they were summoned in by 
Cromwell's order. Whitelocke says that Col. Harrison rose and took 
the speaker by the arm ; Ludlow that he put his hand within the 
speaker's hand, and in this way assisted him out of the chair. These 
and other differences are enough to furnish a hostile critic with the 
means for a plausible attack upon the credibility, if not of the main 
event, of the leading circumstances attending the event. Yet, whoever 
will recur to Mr. Carlyle's or Mr. John Forster's description, will see 
that we are driven to no such unsatisfactory conclusion. 

Nothing can be more unwarrantable and fallacious than to raise 
doubts respecting a whole transaction on account of real or seeming 
discrepancies that relate to a single feature of it. It is a controverted 
question who commanded the American forces at Bunker Hill. Some 
have said that it was Prescott, others have said that it was Putnam. 
Whatever the truth may be, whether it was the one, or the other, or 
neither, or both, this discrepancy in contemporary or later accounts 
proves nothing against the reality of that occurrence which we call 
the Battle of Bunker Hill. The preliminaries and main events of that 
engagement have been correctly reported. The difference in the 
writers as to who was the commander may, perhaps, be adjusted, 
without the ascription of an actual error to any of the authorities on 
which we depend for our knowledge of the event. Yet diversities 
of no more significance have often been made a pretext for impeaching 

^ " Satis constat . . . ipsum deponi lecticam et quietos pati quod fors iniqua 
cogeret jussisse." Fragment, ad lib. cxx., ap. Seneca^ Suasoria, vii. 
2 Hist.^ xlvii. 10. 
2 E 



41 8 APPENDIX 

the trustworthiness of the Gospel historians, and denying the reality 
of the various transactions which they record. 

There is thus a proper sphere for the Harmonist. A consecutive 
narrative, and one as complete as the materials at our command 
render it possible to construct, of the life of Jesus must be founded on 
a comparison of the four Gospels ; just as a history of the Apostolic 
Age must rest upon the foundation of the book of Acts and the 
Epistles studied in connection with it. The prejudice against the 
Harmonists as a class, which prevails widely and is shared by not 
a few scholars who have no disposition to reject the supernatural 
elements of the evangelical history, has its origin in extravagances 
of Harmonistic writers. An extravagant conception of the nature and 
extent of inspiration as related to the historical writings of the New 
Testament has characterized this school. The inspiration of the 
Evangelists, instead of having its effect in an elevation of mind and in 
spiritual insight, has been thought to secure an impeccability of memory, 
— to operate, like the demon of Socrates, in a negative way, and by 
holding them back from the slightest inaccuracy, to furnish a guaranty 
for the absolute correctness of all the minutiae of the narrative. This 
perfection of memory and judgment — which, as Dr. Arnold said, would 
imply the transference of divine attributes to men — has been con- 
sidered an attribute of the apostolic office. As three out of the five 
histories in the New Testament were not written by apostles, it has 
been assumed that the relation of Mark to Peter, and of Luke to Paul, 
secures an apostolic authority to these non-apostolic Evangelists. 
That the second and third Gospels, and the Acts, were ever submitted 
to apostles for their revision and sanction is a proposition which no 
enlightened scholar would venture to affirm. We find that Luke, in 
the prologue of the Gospel, does not assume to write, as Councils of 
the Church have sometimes done, Sa?tcto Spiritu dictante ; but he 
invites confidence on the ground of his means of getting knowledge 
and his diligent investigations. Some of the evangelical historians, 
Luke certainly, make use of prior documents, written memoranda 
from other sources. The apostles themselves claimed credence for 
the story which they told, on the ground that they were telling what 
they had seen and heard. The number of the Twelve, after the defection 
of Judas, was filled up by the choice of Matthias, in order that another 
witness, a companion of Christ, who had heard his teaching and seen 
his works, might be provided (Acts i. 21, 22). We find that the 
apostles limit their testimony to the period of their personal acquaint- 
ance with Christ ; the first thirty years of his life — with the exception 
of a few incidents relating to his infancy and boyhood which were 
gathered up from oral sources — being passed over in silence. The 
laws that determine the credibility of history are respected in the 
composition of the sacred books. Contemporary evidence is furnished. 



APPENDIX 419 

The departures from this practice are the exceptions that prove the 
rule. 

The effect of the rigid Harmonistic assumption, when applied in the 
concrete, is to lead to a mechanical combination of two or more 
relations, where a sound historical criticism would make a choice 
among diverse, and commonly unimportant, particulars, or rectify in 
such points the statement of one Evangelist by the apparently fuller 
information of another. Thus in the accounts of the denial of Peter, 
there is not a precise accordance as to localities. With regard to the 
second denial, Mark says that the same maid (jj Trai^icrxr}) put the 
question to which he responded ; Matthew says, " another maid " ; 
while Luke makes it "another man" (erspos — sc. av^pwTros, ver. 58). 
This is a trifling divergence. It is a case where a narrator might not 
wish to be held responsible for a strictly accurate statement. But 
the older Harmonists, who conceived that the Evangelists must have 
written with the precision of a notary public, felt it necessary to avoid 
these variations by assuming that Peter's denials reached the number 
of nine or ten ; although as to the main fact that they were three 
in number — by which it is meant that there were no more as well 
as no less than three — the Evangelists are united ; and such was 
unquestionably the real number. Out of a dread to admit the slightest 
inaccuracies in the Gospels, the Harmonists convert the evangelical 
history into a grotesque piece of mosaic. 

It may serve to illustrate both the mistaken and the true method of 
historical criticism as applied to the Gospels, if attention is called to a 
few passages where two or more of the Evangelists are compared with 
each other. Look, first, at the Sermon on the Mount. We pass by 
questions as to its chronological place. Luke makes it to have been 
delivered after Christ descended from the Mount to the plain, with his 
disciples. On this point a reconciliation, if one seeks it, is not impos- 
sible ; yet the question arises at once whether Luke does not follow a 
different tradition from that which is presented in Matthew. Compara- 
tively few scholars question the fact that Matthew connects with the 
Sermon on the Mount utterances of Christ on other occasions. This 
we should be led to infer from an inspection of parallel passages which 
occur in other connections in Luke. The Lord's Prayer is an example.^ 

The difference in the text of the Beatitudes in the two Gospels shows 

^ Matt. vi. 5 seq. ; Luke xi. I seq. According to Luke, Jesus was praying 
in a certain place, and was requested by one of the disciples to teach them 
how to pray. That in Matthew other discourses are connected with the 
Sermon on the Mount, Calvin had the acuteness to perceive. He says, 
" Suffi.cere enim pits et modestis lecto7-ibus debet, qicod hie ante oculos positam 
habeant summafu doctrina Christi collectarn ex pluribus et diversis concioji- 
ibiis qiiartim htsc prima fuit, ubi de beaiitudine disseruit apud discipulos." — 
Opera (Amst. ed.), vi. 64. 



420 



APPENDIX 



a diversity in the oral or written tradition that was followed. An in- 
stance of slight circumstantial variation is in the accounts of a miracle 
of Jesus at the gate of Jericho.^ Matthew speaks of two blind men ; 
Mark and Luke of one. It is quite possible that there were two, though 
the conversation of Jesus may have been with only one of them. But 
Matthew and Mark say distinctly that it was when Christ was leaving 
the city, while Luke says that it was when he drew nigh to the city. 
Afterward he passed through the city. Blind men, and mendicants 
of all sorts, took their station at the gates of cities. In the tradition 
which came to Luke, the miracle was placed at the gate by which Jesus 
entered ; in the tradition which appears in the other Evangelists, it was 
the gate by which he left. The discrepancy shows that there was no 
collusion between the Evangelical historians. As in other like cases, 
it confirms, rather than weakens, Christianity evidences. 

The discrepancy in the record of the words spoken from heaven at 
the baptism of Jesus has many parallels in the Gospel histories. A 
familiar instance is that of the inscription on the cross : — 

Mark xv. 26 



Matt, xxvii. 37 

And they set up 
over his head his 
accusation written, 

THIS IS JESUS THE 
KING OF THE JEWS. 



And the super- 
scription of his accu- 
sation was written 
over, THE KING OF 
THE JEWS. 



Luke xxiii. 38 

And there was 
also a superscription 
over him, this is 

THE KING OF THE 
JEWS. 



John xix. 19 

And Pilate wrote a 
title also, and put it on 
the cross. And there 
was written, jEsus 

OF NAZARETH, THE 
KING OF THE JEWS. 

In the Authorized Version, Luke is made to say that the superscription 
was " in letters of Greek and Latin and Hebrew." These words, which 
were probably inserted in the text of Luke from John's Gospel, are left 
out in the Revised Version. The variations in the form of the inscrip- 
tion are seen at a glance. They point to different sources of informa- 
tion. One harmonistic suggestion is that the inscription was not the 
same in the three languages. This of course is possible, but not probable. 
Another familiar example of discrepancies, trifling in their nature, is 
in the accounts of the sending out of the Twelve : — 



Matt. X. 9, 10 
Get you no gold. 



Mark vi. 8 
And he char^red them that 



Luke ix. 3 
And he said unto them, 



silver, nor brass in your they should take nothing Take nothing for your jour- 
purses; (10) no wallet for for their journey, save a ney, neither staff, nor wal- 
your journey, neither two staff only ; no bread, no let, nor bread, nor money ; 
coats, nor slioes, nor staff: wallet, no money in their neither have two coats, 
for the labourer is worthy purse; but to go shod with 
of his food. sandals; and, said he, put 

not on two coats. 

Mark describes the disciples as going forth with nothing in their hands 
but a pilgrim's staff. In Matthew and Luke they are to take not even 
a staff. The idea in all is that they are to go out unprovided, and to 
depend wholly on charity. 

1 Matt. XX. 29-34; Luke xviii. 35-43, xix. i ; Mark x. 46-52. 



APPENDIX 42 1 



NOTE 21 (p. 203) 

The Miracles of the Gospel in Contrast with Heathen and 
Ecclesiastical Miracles^ 

It is frequently alleged that the evidence for pagan and ecclesiastical 
miracles, which fill so large a space in chronicles of a former day, but 
which are generally fictitious, is as strong as that for the miracles 
recorded in the Gospels. What is to be said of the ecclesiastical mira- 
cles is, in the main, applicable to miraculous tales found in ancient 
heathen writers, from Herodotus to Livy, and from Livy to the fall of 
the ancient Graeco-Roman religion. To the stream of Church miracles, 
then, which flows down from the early centuries, through the middle 
ages, almost or quite to our own time, we may confine our attention. 
Is the proof of these alleged miracles equal in force to that of the mira- 
cles recorded by the Evangelists ? So far from this being the case, 
there are certain broad marks of distinction by which these last are 
separated from the general current of miraculous narrative. 

I . One direct, although not the exclusive, purpose of the Gospel mira- 
cles is to attest the fact of revelation. They are the proper counterpart 
and proof of revelation. They occur, with few exceptions, only at the 
marked epochs in the progress of revelation, — the Mosaic era, the 
reform and advance of the Old Testament religion under the great 
prophets, and in connection with the ministry of Christ and the found- 
ing of the Church. " We know," it was said, " that thou art a teacher 
come from God ; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, 
except God be with him " (John iii. 2). 

On the contrary, ecclesiastical miracles profess to be for a lower, and, 
in general, for a signally lower end. At the best, they are to aid the 
preaching of a missionary. The biblical miracles were requisite as a 
part and proof of revelation. When they have once taken place, testi- 
mony adequate is all that can reasonably be demanded as a ground of 
belief in them. There is no call for a perpetual interruption of the 
course of nature. Even the Roman Catholic Church holds that the 
whole deposit of revelation was with Christ and the apostles. The 
dogmatic decisions of popes and councils are the exposition of that 
primitive doctrine. Their function is not to originate, but to define, 
Christian truth. 

But, in a vast majority of instances, the ecclesiastical miracles are for 
some end below that of serving as the credentials of a missionary. At 
the best, they are to relieve the distress of an individual, without the 
ulterior and more comprehensive end which attaches to the miracles 

^ Among the valuable discussions of this subject are Douglas's Criterion^ 
Newman's Two Essays (4th ed., 1875), and Mozley's Banipton Lectures. 



422 APPENDIX 

wrought by Jesus and the apostles. In a multitude of instances they 
simply minister to an appetite for marvels. Witness the wonders that 
crowd the pages of the apocryphal Gospels. Many are for objects 
extremely trivial. Fantastic wonders are ascribed to Jesus as having 
been wrought in his childhood. Tertullian gives an account of a vision 
in which an angel prescribed to a female the size and length of her veil. 
Some, like the Jansenist miracles at the tomb of Abbe Paris, which 
Hume cites as modern examples of miracles supported by testimony, 
are in the cause of a political or religious party, and against an antago- 
nistic faction. Very frequently miracles are valued, and said to be 
wrought, merely as verifications of the sanctity of a person of high 
repute for piety. 

The distinction which we are here considering is important. No 
doubt there is an antecedent presumption against the occurrence of 
miracles, which arises from our belief in the uniformity of nature and 
the conviction we have that an established order is beneficent. This 
presumption Christians believe to be neutralized by the need of revela- 
tion, and by the peculiar characteristics of the Christian system and 
of its author. But in proportion as the end assigned to miracles is 
lower, that adverse presumption retains force. 

2. The Gospel miracles were not wrought in coincidence with a 
prevailing system, and for the furtherance of it, but in connection with 
teaching hostile to prevalent beliefs. 

This is another striking difference. Jesus won all of his disciples 
to faith in him. They did not inherit this faith : they did not grow up 
in it. He and they alike had to confront opposition at every step. 
" The world," he said, " hateth me." His doctrines and his idea of the 
kingdom of God clashed with Judaic opinion and rooted prejudice. 
Christianity had to push forward in the face of the enmity of all 
the existing forms of religion. But how is it with the ecclesiastical 
miracles of later ages? Generally speaking, they occurred, if wrought 
at all, in the midst of communities and smaller circles of devotees 
which were already in fervent sympathy with the cause and the creed 
in behalf of which they were supposed to be performed. The narrations 
of them sprang up among those who were, beforehand, full of con- 
fidence in the Church as the possessor of miraculous power, and in 
the close relation to God of the individuals to whom such miracles 
were ascribed. Not as in the days of Jesus and the apostles were 
these denounced and proscribed by the ecclesiastical rulers and leaders. 
Recollecting what occurred at the origin of the Church, full of faith in 
the supernatural powers which were thought still to reside in it, men 
were on the lookout for starthng manifestations of them. There was 
a previous habit of credulity in this particular direction. The same 
scepticism which is deemed reasonable in respect to stories of miracles 
performed by Dominicans or Franciscans, where the rival interests 



APPENDIX 423 

of the two orders are involved, is natural in regard to wonders said to 
have been wrought in behalf of a creed enthusiastically cherished. In 
Galilee, Judea, and the various provinces of the Roman Empire, 
Christianity was a new religion. It was at the start an unpopular 
religion, in a struggle against widespread, bitter prejudice. The 
whole atmosphere was thus totally different from that which prevailed 
in the middle ages, or even in the Roman Empire, after the Gospel had 
succeeded in gaining hundreds of thousands of converts. 

3. Motives to fraud, which justly excite suspicion in the case of many 
of the ecclesiastical miracles, did not exist in the case of the miracles 
of the Gospel. 

It cannot be denied that pious fraud played a prominent part in 
producing the tales of the supernatural which are interspersed in the 
biographies of the saints. Ecclesiastical superiors have often given 
a free rein to popular credulity, on the maxim that the end sanctifies 
the means. Where positive trickery has not been practised, circum- 
stances have been concealed, which, if known, would have stripped 
many a transaction of the miraculous aspect which it wore in the eyes 
of the ignorant. The same spirit that gave rise to the medieval 
forgeries, of which the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals are a conspicuous 
example, was capable of conniving at numberless deceits which served 
to bolster up sacerdotal pretensions. In order that an individual may 
be enrolled as a saint, and invoked in this character, it has been held 
to be indispensable that he should have wrought miracles. Miracles 
are held to be a badge of sainthood. It is easy to conceive, not only 
what a stimulus this theory must have afforded to the devout imagina- 
tion, but also what conscious exaggeration and wilful invention must 
have sprung out of such a tenet. 

When we enter the company of Christ and the apostles, we find that 
this incentive to the invention of miracles is utterly absent. We find, 
rather, the deepest antipathy to every species of deceit and fraud. 

4. A great number of the Roman Catholic miracles can be explained 
by natural causes, without any impeachment of the honesty of the 
narrators. Frequently, natural events of no uncommon occurrence are 
viewed as supernatural. The physical effect of vigils, and fastings, and 
pilgrimages, on the maladies of those who resorted to these practices, 
was, no doubt, in many cases salutary. As the body acts on the mind, 
so the mind powerfully affects the body. Heated imagination, ardent 
faith, the confident hope of relief, may produce physical effects of an 
extraordinary character. There is a variety of nervous disorders which 
are cured by a sudden shock which turns feeling into a new channel. 
Mohammed was a victim of hysteria attended by catalepsy. Especially 
when medical knowledge was scanty, exceptional conditions of mind 
and body were easily mistaken for supernatural phenomena. 

If the miracles of the Gospels consisted only of visions, or of the 



424 APPENDIX 

cure of less aggravated cases of demoniacal possession, or of the healing 
of a limited class of diseases which spring mainly from nervous derange- 
ment, there might be no occasion for referring them to supernatural 
agency. But such miracles as healing, by a touch, of one born blind, 
the cure of the lunatic at Gadara, the multiplication of the loaves, the 
conversion of water into wine, the raising of the son of the widow of 
Nain, and of Lazarus, the resurrection of Jesus himself, baffle attempts 
at naturalistic solution. If miracles such as these are admitted on the 
ground of the testimony to them, in connection with the exalted char- 
acter of Christ and with the doctrine of Christianity, it is alike unrea- 
sonable and profitless to resort to any naturalistic explanation of visions 
and cures, some of which, considered by themselves, might perhaps be 
accounted for by that method. A line of demarcation between two sets 
of Gospel miracles is drawn without any historical warrant. If certain 
of them do not of necessity carry us beyond the limit of known physio- 
logical and psychological causes, and if this boundary is not strictly 
definable, others there are, equally well attested, which do undeniably 
lie beyond this limit, and, if the phenomena are admitted, must be 
referred to the interposition of God. 

5. The incom.petence of the witnesses to ecclesiastical miracles, as a 
rule, is a decisive reason for discrediting their accounts. We do not 
include under this head an intention to deceive. Reports of pagan and 
ecclesiastical miracles frequently rest on no contemporary evidence. It 
was more than a century after the death of Apollonius of Tyana when 
Philostratus wrote his life. Sixteen years after the death of Ignatius 
Loyola, Ribadeneira wrote his biography At that time he knew of no 
miracles performed by his hero. St. Francis Xavier himself makes but 
one or two references to wonders wrought by him : and these occur- 
rences do not necessarily imply anything miraculous. In the case of 
an ancient saint, Gregory Thaumaturgus, the life that we possess was 
written long after his time by Gregory Nyssa. Boniface, the apostle to 
the Germans, and Ansgar, the apostle to the Scandinavians, do not 
themselves claim to be miracle-workers. It is others who make the 
claim for them. Of the string of miracles which Bede furnishes, there 
are few, if any, which he afiirms to have occurred within his personal 
knowledge. 

Where there are contemporary narratives, it is evident, generally, that 
the chroniclers are too deficient in the habit of accurate observation to 
be trusted. This want of carefulness is manifest in what they have to 
say of ordinary matters. Dr. Arnold gives an example of the inac- 
curacy of Bede.^ The Saxon chronicler describes a striking phenome- 
non on the southern coast of England in such a way that one who is 
familiar with it would be quite unable to recognize it from this author's 

^ Lectures on Modern History (Am. ed.), p. 128. 



APPENDIX 425 

description. Where the observation of natural objects is so careless, 
how can we expect a correct account of phenomena which are taken for 
miraculous? Excited feeling, on the watch for marvels, in minds not 
in the least trained to strict observation, renders testimony to a great 
extent worthless. 

Now, who were the original witnesses of the miracles of Jesus? As 
Cardinal Newman has said, " They were very far from a dull or ignorant 
race. The inhabitants of a maritime and border country (as Galilee 
was) ; engaged, moreover, in commerce ; composed of natives of vari- 
ous countries, and therefore, from the nature of the case, acquainted 
with more than one language — have necessarily their intellects sharp- 
ened, and their minds considerably enlarged, and are of all men least 
disposed to acquiesce in marvellous tales. Such a people must have 
examined before they suffered themselves to be excited in the degree 
which the Evangelists describe.'' Their conviction, be it observed, was 
no " bare and indolent assent to facts which they might have thought 
antecedently probable, or not improbable," but a great change in prin- 
ciple and mode of life, and such a change as involved the sacrifice of 
every earthly good. There is a vast difference between the dull assent 
of superstitious minds, the impressions of unreflecting devotees, and 
that positive faith which transformed the character of the first disciples, 
and moved them to forsake their kindred, and to lay down their lives, in 
attestation of the truth of their testimony. A conviction on the part 
of such persons, and attended by consequences like these, must have had 
its origin in an observation of facts about which there could be no 
mistake. 

6. The Gospel miracles, unlike the ecclesiastical, were none of them 
merely tentative, unsuccessful, or of doubtful reality. 

In ancient times the temple of ^sculapius was thronged by persons 
in quest of healing at the hands of the God. No one could pretend 
that more than a fraction of these votaries were actually healed. Of 
the multitude who failed of the benefit there was no mention or memory. 

To come down to a later day, many thousands were annually touched 
for the scrofula by the English kings. Some recovered ; and their 
recovery, no doubt, was blazoned abroad. But, of the generality of 
those who thus received the royal touch, there is not the slightest proof 
that it was followed by a recovery. So, elsewhere, among those to 
whom miraculous power has been attributed, the instances of apparent 
success were connected with uncounted failures of which no record is 
preserved. Even in the cases where it is loudly claimed that there was 
every appearance of miracles, as in certain of the wonders at the tomb 
of the Abbd Paris, it is found that some have been only partially relieved 
of their maladies, or have experienced soon a recurrence of them. 

Mark the contrast presented by the miracles of the Gospel. They 
were performed by a definite class of persons. They were "the signs 



426 APPENDIX 

of an apostle." The main point, however, is that there were no excep- 
tions, none on whom the wonder-working power failed of its effect. 
There were no abortive experiments. All whom Jesus attempted to 
heal were healed. None went away as they came. None went away 
with painful symptoms alleviated, while the disorders were not removed. 
Had such instances of failure occurred, they would not have escaped 
the attention of the apostles and of their enemies. Confidence in 
Christ would have been weakened, if not subverted. In accounting 
for the Gospel miracles, the supposition of accident is thus precluded. 
We do not reason from occasional coincidences. 

7. The grotesque character of so large a number of the ecclesiastical 
miracles awakens a just presumption against them as a class. 

A miracle emanates from the power of God. But it will not be, for 
that reason, at variance with his other attributes. As far as an alleged 
miracle appears to be unworthy of God in any particular, its title to be 
credited is weakened. 

The miracles in the apocryphal Gospels (such as that of the throne 
of Herod, drawn out to its right length by the child Jesus, to remedy a 
blunder of Joseph in making it) give no unfair idea of the style of 
many narratives in the legends of the Church. Among the miracles 
attributed to Thomas a Becket is the story that the eyes of a priest of 
Nantes, who doubted them, fell from their sockets. " In remembrance," 
says Froude, " of his old sporting days, the archbishop would mend 
the broken wings and legs of hawks which had suffered from herons." 
" Dead lambs, pigs, and geese were restored to life, to silence Saddu- 
cees who doubted the resurrection." ^ The biographers of Xavier relate 
that, having washed the sores of a poor invalid, he drank the water ^ 
and the sores were forthwith healed. Even St. Bernard, preaching on 
a summer day in a church where the people were annoyed by flies, 
excommunicates these winged insects ; and in the morning they are 
found to be all dead, and are swept out in heaps. It would be unjust 
to say that trivial, ludicrous, or disgusting circumstances belong to all 
ecclesiastical miracles. But such features are so common that they 
tend to affix a corresponding character to the set of wonders, taken as 
a whole, to which they pertain. 

That the miracles of the Bible have a dignity and beauty peculiar to 
themselves is acknowledged by disbelievers ; for instance, by the author 
of Supernatural Religion. If any of them are thought to wear a dif- 
ferent look, they are exceptions. " Hence," observes Cardinal Newman, 
" the Scripture accounts of Eve's temptation by the serpent, of the 
speaking of Balaam's ass, of Jonah and the whale, and of the devils 
sent into the herd of swine are by themselves more or less improbable, 

1 Dr. E. A. Abbott's work on Becket furnishes a variety of examples equally 
grotesque and in themselves unworthy of credit. See, e.g., St. Thomas of 
Canterbury, I. 265 seq. See also Morris's Life of Becket, c. xxxiv. 



APPENDIX 427 

being unequal in dignity to the rest." "They are then supported," the 
same author holds, " by the system in which they are found, as being a 
few out of a multitude, and therefore but exceptions (and, as we sup- 
pose, but apparent exceptions) to the general rule." Whether this be 
so or not, the remark implies that their exceptional character makes 
it necessary that they should have an extraordinary support if they are 
to be credited. The generality of the miracles of Scripture are of an 
elevated character. They are at a wide remove in this respect from 
the common run of pagan and ecclesiastical miracles. The contrast 
is like that of a genuine coin with a clumsy counterfeit. 

8. The evidential value of the miracles of the Gospel is not weakened, 
even if it be admitted that miraculous events may have occasionally 
occurred in later ages. 

The restoration of the sick in response to prayer is commonly 
through no visible or demonstrable exception to the unaided operation 
of natural law. Yet no one deserves contempt for holding that, in 
certain exceptional instances, the supernatural agency discovers itself 
by evidence palpable to the senses. So discreet an historical critic as 
Neander will not deny that St. Bernard may have been the instrument 
of effecting cures properly miraculous. It is true, as was suggested 
above, that missionary work is something to which human powers are 
adequate, and which requires no other aid from above than the silent, 
invisible operation of the Spirit of God. Yet Edmund Burke, speaking 
of the introduction of Christianity into Britain by Augustine and his 
associates, remarks, " It is by no means impossible that, for an end so 
worthy. Providence on some occasions might directly have interfered." 
" I should think it very presumptuous to say," writes F. D. Maurice, 
" that it has never been needful, in the modern history of the world, to 
break the idols of sense and experience by the same method which 
was sanctioned in the days of old." Those who, like the writers just 
quoted, hold that miraculous events have not been wholly wanting in 
later ages, cannot maintain that they have occurred under such condi- 
tions of uniformity and the like, as distinguish the miracles of Christ 
and the apostles. The most that can be claimed is that someti7nes 
they have occurred in answer to prayer, — a form of answer on which 
the petitioner has never been able to count. The judicious student 
who surveys the entire history of miraculous pretension will be slow to 
admit the miraculous in particular instances of the kind described, 
without the application of strict tests of evidence. He will bear in 
mind that the great, the principal design of the miracle is to serve as at 
once a constituent and proof of revelation. 

A particular examination of the alleged miracles of the early age 
of the Church is precluded by the limits of the present Note. The 
following points are specially worthy of attention : — 



428 APPENDIX 

1. The miracles said to have been performed in the second and 
third centuries are far less marked and less numerous than those 
referred to in the two centuries that followed, — a fact the reverse of 
what we should expect if these narrations were founded in truth. 

2. The same writers — as Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine — 
who record contemporary miracles, imply in other passages that the 
age of miracles had gone by, ancj that their own times were in marked 
contrast, in this respect, with the era of the apostles. 

3. The miracles related by the Fathers are mostly exorcisms, the 
healing of the sick, and visions ; that is, occurrences where natural 
agencies are most easily mistaken for supernatural. Miracles in which 
this error is impossible lack sufficient attestation.^ 

The true view on this subject appears to be that miraculous manifes- 
tations in the Church ceased gradually. No sharp line of demarcation 
can be drawn, marking off the age of miracles from the subsequent 
period, when the operation of the Divine Providence and Spirit was no 
longer palpably distinguished from the movements of natural law. 

As we advance into the fourth century, called the Nicene age, we 
meet with a notable increase in the number of alleged miracles. Yet 
Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, speak of the apostolic age, as distin- 
guished from their own, as having been a period marked by miracles. 
Notwithstanding the high merits of the authors of the Nicene era, they 
discover, more and more, the artificial, rhetorical tone which had now 
come to infect literature. There was a habit of thought and style which 
tends to breed exaggeration. It was a period of decadence. Relic- 
worship, the invocation of martyrs and saints, and like superstitions 
established themselves in the Church, and the alleged miracles were 
frequently associated with these customs. A spirit of credulity gained 
ground. The evidence for most of the post-apostolic miracles which 
the Fathers advert to melts away on examination. In cases where there 
is no ground for distrusting the sincerity of the narrator, we are bound 
to consider whether the phenomena which one of the Fathers reports 
were known to him directly ; and, if they were, whether they neces- 
sarily involve anything miraculous, — whether they may not reasonably 
be referred to hallucination, or to some other source of unconscious 
illusion. 

As an example, we may take the reports of miracles which Augustine 
has collected in his treatise on the City of God.^ He starts with a ref- 
erence to the objection that miracles are no longer wrought. " It might 
be replied," he says, " that they are no longer necessary, as they were 
at first." This answer is in keeping with other statements made by 
him, which imply that no such miracles were wrought in his time as 

^ For the Patristic passages on these three points, see Mozley's Bampton 
Lectures, pp. 195 seq. 2 Lib, xxii. 



APPENDIX 429 

were done by Christ and the apostles. But in this place he affirms 
that miracles are wrought, though more privately, and that they are less 
widely reported. Many of those to which he refers are alleged to have 
been performed in connection with the relics of the proto-martyr 
Stephen, which, as was claimed, were discovered in a.d. 415, at a place 
called Carphagamala, in Palestine, through information given by Gama- 
liel, the Jewish rabbi, in visions to Lucian, a priest of the Church there. 
A portion of these relics found their way to Africa, and became the 
centre of miraculous phenomena, the details of which are given by 
Augustine. The circumstances of the finding of the relics are so im- 
probable as to suggest beforehand a legitimate doubt as to miraculous 
interpositions in connection with them. But Augustine also relates 
other miracles as having occurred in Africa. The first is described at 
length : it is the disappearance of a fistula from the body of a man 
at Carthage, who had not long before undergone a surgical operation 
for the same trouble. This event, which fills Augustine with devout 
amazement, is easily accounted for by physicians at present, without 
any recourse to the supernatural. It was simply ignorance of physi- 
ology that led to the inference that it was a miracle. The next case is 
that of Innocentia, a Christian woman in the same city, who had a 
cancer on one of her breasts, and was cured by the sign of the cross 
made upon it by the first woman whom she saw coming out of the bap- 
tistery, of whom she had been directed in a dream to ask this favor. 
Here, in the absence of a more particular statement of the circum- 
stances, it would be rash to suppose a miracle. But the attestation is 
in this case singularly deficient. The supposed miracle had been kept 
secret, much to Augustine's indignation, who was somehow informed 
of the event, and reprimanded the woman for not making it public. 
She replied that she had not kept silence on the subject. But Augus- 
tine found, on inquiry, that the women who were best acquainted with 
her " knew nothing of it," and ^' listened in great astonishment,"" when, 
at his instigation, she told her story. How remarkable that the sud- 
den deliverance from a disorder which the physicians had pronounced 
incurable should not have been known to her most intimate female 
acquaintance ! Why did she tell Augustine that she had not kept it 
to herself? How did he himself find it out ? The next miracle is that 
of ''black, woolly-haired boys," who appeared to a gouty doctor and 
warned him not to be baptized that year. They trod on his feet, and 
caused him the acutest pain. He knew them to be devils, and disobeyed 
them. He was relieved in the very act of baptism, and did not suffer 
from gout afterward. If we suppose that the fact was well attested, 
who would be bold enough to ascribe it to a miracle ? How easy, in a 
multitude of cures of this sort, to confound the antecedent with the 
cause, the post hoc with the propter hod Several of the miracles which 
Augustine had gathered into his net are of a grotesque character, as 



430 APPENDIX 

that which provided Florentius, a poor tailor of Hippo, with a new coat, 
after a prayer to the twenty martyrs, whose shrine was near at hand. 
Who was the cook that found the gold ring in the fish's belly? and who 
was it that interrogated her on the subject? There are three or four 
instances of the raising of the dead which are found in Augustine's list. 
But of neither of these does he pretend to have been an eye-witness ; 
nor, if the circumstances are credited in the form in which they are 
given, is there anything to prove that death had actually taken place. 
A swoon, or the temporary suspension of the powers of life, may have 
been in each instance all that really occurred. 

Another miracle in Augustine's catalogue is that of the martyrs of 
Milan, which occurred while he was in that city, and which is also 
described circumstantially by Ambrose, the celebrated bishop. A vio- 
lent conflict was raging between Ambrose and the mass of the populace, 
on the one side, and the Arian Empress Justina, the widow of Valentin- 
ian I., with her following, on the other. Ambrose had refused her 
demand that one church edifice should be set apart for Arian worship. 
The populace, who were in full sympathy with their bishop, were in a 
high state of excitement. A new church was to be dedicated, and they 
were eager for relics with which to enrich it. Then follows the unex- 
pected discovery of the remains of two utterly forgotten martyrs, Prota- 
sius and Gervasius, with fresh blood upon them, and able to shake the 
earth in the neighborhood where they lay. As they are transported 
through the city, a blind butcher touches the fringe of the pall that 
covers them, and at once receives his sight. We are not willing to join 
with Isaac Taylor in imputing to Ambrose himself complicity in a fraud. 
Yet the circumstances connected with the discovery of the bodies indi- 
cate that fraud and superstitious imagination were combined in those 
who were most active in the matter. The blindness of the butcher was 
not congenital. It was a disorder which had obliged him to retire from 
his business. But oculists know well that cases of total or partial blind- 
ness are sometimes instantly relieved. What was the special cause of 
the disorder in this instance ? Had there been symptoms of amend- 
ment before ? Was the cure complete at the moment ? As long as we 
are unable to answer these and like questions, it is unwise to assume 
that there was a miracle. We miss in the accounts, be it observed, the 
sobriety of the Gospel narratives. They are surcharged with the florid 
rhetoric to which we have adverted. 

The evidence for most of those post-apostolic miracles which are 
more commonly referred to melts away on examination. The miracle 
of " the thundering legion," whose prayers are said to have saved the 
army of Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 174), and to have thus turned him from 
his hostility to Christianity, is one of these. But no such effect was 
produced on the emperor's mind, since he persecuted the Christians 
afterwards (a.d. 178). The tempest of rain which brought relief to the 



APPENDIX 43 1 

army, the heathen asserted to be the consequence of their own prayers 
to Jupiter. If it was true that a sudden shower of the kind described in 
the story followed upon the supplications of the Christian soldiers, we 
should hardly be justified in pronouncing it a miracle in the proper 
sense of the term. The story of the cross with an inscription upon it, 
seen by Constantine in the sky, Eusebius heard from the emperor not 
until twenty-six years after the event, and was not acquainted with it 
when, with the best opportunities for informing himself, he wrote his 
Church History (about a.d. 325). That Constantine had a dream in 
the night such as Lactantius describes, is not improbable. It is possible 
that on the day previous, a parhelion, or some similar phenomenon, 
may have seemed to his excited and superstitious feeling a cross of light. 
Under the circumstances, and considering the defects in the testimony, 
the natural explanation is far the most probable. None of the post- 
apostolic miracles appears to have a stronger attestation than that of 
the breaking-out of fire from the foundations of the temple at Jerusalem, 
when the workmen, by the order of the Emperor Julian, set about the 
task of rebuilding that edifice. The fact is stated by a contemporary 
heathen writer of good repute, Ammianus Marcellinus. Notwithstand- 
ing the' grave historical difficulties which have been suggested by Lard- 
ner and others, it seems most reasonable to conclude that some startling 
phenomenon of the kind actually occurred. Neander says, " A sign 
coming from God is here certainly not to be mistaken, although natural 
causes also cooperate."^ Guizot, in his notes on Gibbon, explains the 
occurrence by referring it to the explosion of the subterranean gases 
suddenly liberated by the workmen. Although the admission of a 
miracle in such a case detracts nothing from the peculiar function and 
evidential force of the miracles of Scripture, we cannot feel obliged to 
call in here supernatural agency. Natural causes of a physical nature, 
together with the fears and fancies of the laborers, and the exaggerating 
imagination of reporters, suffice to explain the alarm that was created, 
and the cessation of the work. 

The standing argument at the present day against the credibility 
of the Evangelists is the precedent afforded by the biographers of '' the 
saints," and of the incredible marvels which they mingle with authentic 
history. To some it is no matter of surprise that the apostles should 
be utterly deceived in this branch of their testimony. Thus Matthew 
Arnold boldly admits, that, if we had the original reports of eye- 
witnesses, we should not have a miracle less than we have now.^ Very 
diflferent is the judgment of a great historical scholar, Niebuhr. He 
refers to the critical spirit in which he had come to the study of the 

^ Church History, vol. ii. pp. 69, 70. 

2 Contemporary Review, vol. xxvi. p. 697. 



432 APPENDIX 

New Testament histories and to the imperfections which he believed 
himself to find in them. He adds : '• Here, as in every historical 
subject, when I contemplated the immeasurable gulf between the nar- 
rative and the facts narrated, this disturbed me no further. He whose 
earthly life and sorrows were depicted had for me a perfectly real 
existence, and his whole history had the same reality, even if it were 
not related with literal exactness in any single point. Hence, also, the 
fundamental fact of miracles, which, according to my conviction, must 
be conceded, unless we adopt the not merely incomprehensible but 
absurd hypothesis that the Holiest was a deceiver, and his disciples 
either dupes or liars ; and that deceivers had preached a holy religion, 
in which self-renunciation is everything, and in which there is nothing 
tending toward the erection of a priestly rule, — nothing that can be 
acceptable to vicious inclinations. As regards a miracle in the strictiest 
sense, it really only requires an unprejudiced and penetrating study 
of nature to see that those related are as far as possible from absurdity, 
and a comparison with legends, or the pretended miracles of other 
religions, to perceive by what a different spirit they are animated.'" ^ 

" To perceive by what a differe^it spirit they are animated " — it is 
just this which Renan fails to see in the legends of the saints. It is 
found impossible to dispute the fact that testimony substantially 
equivalent to the contents of the Gospels was given by the apostles. 
The grand hypothesis of a post-apostolic mythology, set up by Strauss, 
is given up. That the apostles were wilful deceivers, if it be sometimes 
insinuated, is felt to be a weak position. This old fortification of un- 
belief is abandoned. What, then, shall be said? Why, answers 
Renan, they were, like the followers of St. Francis of Assisi, credulous, 
romantic enthusiasts. The frequency with which he reverts to the 
lives of St. Francis indicates what is the real source and prop of his 
theory in his own mind. It is well to look at this pretended parallel 
more narrowly. 

We have two lives of St. Francis by personal followers, — one, by 
Thomas de Celano ; and another, by the " three companions." Another 
life is from the pen of Bonaventura, who was five years old when the 
saint died. 2 The moment one takes up these biographies, he finds 
himself in an atmosphere different from that of nature and real life. 
He is transported into dream-land. Feeling drowns perception. 
Everything is suffused with emotion. We are in an atmosphere 
where neither discriminating judgment nor cool observation is to be 
looked for. Here is an example of the strain of eulogy in which these 
disciples of St. Francis, intoxicated with admiration, indulge : " Oh, 
how beautiful, how splendid, how glorious, he appeared, in innocence 

1 Memoir of Niehuhr (Am. ed.), p. 236. 

2 These lives are in the Acta Sanctorum (ed. nov.), vol. 90, pp. 683, 798. 



APPENDIX 433 

of life and in simplicity of language, in purity of heart, in delight in 
God, in fraternal love, in odorous obedience, in complaisant devoted- 
ness, in angelic aspect ! Sweet in manners, placid in nature, affable in 
speech, most apt in exhortation, most faithful in trusts, prudent in 
counsel, efficient in action, gracious in all things, serene in mind, sweet 
in spirit, sober in temper, steadfast in contemplation, persevering in 
esteem, and in all things the same, swift to show favor, slow to anger," 
etc.^ This is only one of the outbursts of ecstatic admiration for " the 
morning star,'' the luminary " more radiant than the sun," in which 
these chroniclers break out. When we turn to the saint who is 
the object of all this fervor, we find in his character, to be sure, much 
to respect. There is " sweetness and light " ; but the light is by far 
the minor factor. The practice of asceticism rendered his bodily 
state at all times abnormal and unhealthy. To lie on the ground, 
with a log for a pillow ; to deny himself the refreshment of sleep 
when it was most needed ; to choose, on principle, the coarsest food, 
and to insist on its being cooked, if cooked at all, in a way that made 
it as unpalatable and indigestible as possible ; to weep every day so 
copiously that his eyesight was nearly destroyed, and then, as always 
when he was ill, to take remedies with great reluctance, if he took them 
at all — these customs were not favorable to sanity of mental action 
any more than to soundness of body. They coexisted with attractive 
virtues ; they sprang from pure motives ; but they were none the less 
excesses of superstition. Persuaded on one occasion, when he was 
enfeebled by illness, to eat of a fowl, he demonstrated his penitence by 
causing himself to be led, with a rope round his neck, like a criminal, 
through the streets of Assisi, by one of his followers, who shouted all 
the time, " Behold the glutton!" 

The sort of miracles ascribed to St. Francis, and the measure of cre- 
dence which the stories of them deserve, may be understood from what 
is said of his miraculous dealing with the low^er animals. On a journey, 
leaving his companions in the road, he stepped aside into the midst of a 
concourse of doves, crows, and other birds. They were not frightened 
at his approach. Whereupon he delivered to them a sermon, in which 
he addressed them as '' my brother-birds," and gave them wholesome 
counsel — supposing them able to comprehend it — respecting their 
duties to God. But we are assured that they did comprehend it, and 
signified their approbation by stretching their necks, opening their 
mouths, and flapping their wings. Having received from the saint the 
benediction, and permission to go, this winged congregation flew away. 
This is only one in a catalogue of wonders of the same kind. Fishes, 
as well as birds, listened to preaching, and waited for the discourse to 
conclude. We can readily believe Celano, when he says that St. Fran- 
cis was a man of " the utmost fervor," and had a feeling of " piety and 
^ Acta Sanctorum, ut supra, p. 716. 
2 F 



434 



APPENDIX 



gentleness towards irrational creatures." He was probably one of those 
who have a remarkable power of dispelling the fear, and winning the 
confidence, of animals. Incidents where this natural power was exer- 
cised were magnified, by the fancy of devotees, into the tales, a sample 
of which has been given. A like discount from other miraculous narra- 
tives resting on the same testimony would reduce the events which 
they relate to the dimensions of natural, though it may be remarkable, 
occurrences. It is needless to recount these alleged miracles. One or 
two will suffice. Travelling together, St. Francis and his followers see 
in the road a purse, apparently stuffed with coins. There was a temp- 
tation to pick it up. The rule of poverty was in imminent peril. The 
saint warns his curious disciple that the devil is in the purse. Finally, 
the disciple, after prayer, is permitted to touch it, when out leaps a 
serpent, and instantly — mirabile didul — serpent and purse vanish. 
When the saint came to die, one of his followers beheld his soul, as it 
parted from the body, in appearance like an immense luminous star, 
shedding its radiance over many waters, borne upon a white cloud, and 
ascending straight to heaven. 

The great miracle in connection with St. Francis is that of the " stig- 
mata," or the marks of the wounds of Christ, which the Saviour was 
thought in a vision to have imprinted upon his body. From the hour 
when a vision of the crucified Christ was vouchsafed him, as he thought, 
while he was in prayer before his image, "his heart," say the '''•tres 
socii,'''' was wounded and melted at the recollection of the Lord's pas- 
sion ; so that he carried while he lived the wounds — stigmata — ■ of the 
Lord Jesus in his heart. He sought in all ways to be literally conformed 
to the Lord as a sufferer. For example, remembering that the Virgin 
had no place where her son could lay his head, he would take his food 
from the table where he was dining, carry it out, and eat it on the 
ground. It was his constant effort to bring upon himself the identical 
experiences of pain and sorrow which befell Christ. Especially did he 
concentrate his thoughts in intense and long-continued meditation on 
the crucifixion. There is a considerable number of other instances of 
stigfjiata found upon the body, besides that of St. Francis. The scien- 
tific solution, which has high authority in its favor, is that the phenom- 
enon in question is the result of the mental state acting by a physiological 
law upon the body. It is considered to be one effect of the mysterious 
interaction of mind and body, the products of which, when body and 
mind are in a morbid condition, are exceptionally remarkable. 

Before leaving our subject, let the reader reflect on that one trait of 
the apostles by which they are distinguished from other witnesses to 
alleged miracles. It is Xhtix truthfuhtess. Men may be devout ; they 
may be capable of exalted emotions ; they may undertake works of 
self-sacrifice, and be revered for their saintly tempers ; and yet they 
may lack this one sterling quality on which the worth of testimony 



APPENDIX 435 

depends. This defect may not be conscious. It may result from a 
passive, uninquiring temper. It may grow out of a habit of seeing 
things in a hazy atmosphere of feeling, in which all things are refracted 
from the right line. But the apostles, unlike many devotees of even 
Christian ages, were truthful. Without this habit of seeing and relating 
things as they actually occurred, their writings would never have exerted 
that pure influence which has flowed from them. Because they uttered 
" words of truth and soberness," they make those who thoroughly sym- 
pathize with the spirit of their writings value truth above all things. 

And there is one proof of the truth of the apostles' testimony which 
can be appreciated by the unlearned. The character of Jesus as he is 
depicted in the Gospels is too unique to be the result of invention. It 
is the image of a perfection too transcendent to be devised by the wit 
of man. Yet it is perfectly self-consistent, and obviously real in all its 
traits. In him the natural and the supernatural, divine authority and 
human feeling, the power which gives life to the dead and the sympathy 
which expresses itself in tears, blend in complete accord. This portrait 
of Christ in the Gospels is evidently drawn from the life. It demon- 
strates the truth of the Gospel history. 

NOTE 22 (p. 343) 

It is not uncommon at present to hear it asserted or insinuated that 
religion, and the Christian religion in particular, has been an obstacle in 
the way of the progress of natural science, including, under this desig- 
nation, the various departments of research which concern themselves 
with the material world. Sometimes Christianity is spoken of as an 
enemy still formidable. The questions which the naturalist has striven 
to settle by observation and reasoning, he has been told are already 
determined, once for all, by the infallible authority of the Bible. 

The general allegation is not without plausibility. It is not a pure 
fabrication. There are facts on which it is founded, whatever mistake 
and whatever exaggeration are carried into the interpretation of them. 
That in the name of religion, in past times, nearer and more remote, the 
legitimate pursuits, researches, arguments, and hypotheses of physical in- 
quirers have been frowned upon, denounced, and proscribed is undeni- 
able. In antiquity, prior to Christ, science was not without its persecuted 
votaries. Anaxagoras was arraigned before an Athenian court for holding 
impious physical doctrine, such as the opinion that the sun is an incandes- 
cent stone, larger than the Peloponnesus ; and he owed his deliverance to 
the friendship and the eloquence of Pericles. Passing down into Chris- 
tian times, it is a familiar fact that, in the middle ages, the students who 
early interested themselves in chemical experiments — whether in the 
hope of transmuting the baser metals into gold, or for some better reason 
— were suspected of having entered into a league with the devil, and of 



436 APPENDIX 

accomplishing their experiments with the aid of this dark confederate. 
Even Albert the Great, the teacher of Aquinas, did not wholly escape 
this dangerous suspicion. At a later day Roger Bacon had more to 
endure on the ground of analogous imputations. Turning to still later 
times, we are at once reminded of the ecclesiastical antagonism to 
astronomy, and of the memorable case of Galileo. The publication of 
the documents connected with this case has put it into the power of 
every candid person, who will give the requisite attention to them, to 
get at an exact knowledge of the facts ; and it has put it out of the 
power of theological partisans to conceal or distort the truth. It is true 
that much is still said of the Florentine astronomer's imprudence in the 
advocacy of his doctrines, and of his temerity in venturing to discuss 
the biblical relations of his discoveries, instead of leaving the interpre- 
tation of texts to the authorized mouthpieces of the Church. But nothing 
that he did aifords any valid excuse, or hardly even a faint palliation, 
for the enormous wrong of the organized, unrelenting endeavor to sup- 
press the publication of important scientific truth, and for the more ter- 
rible sin of driving an old man to perjure himself by abjuring beliefs 
which his tempters and persecutors well knew that in his heart he really 
held. 

Nothing so disgraceful as the condemnation of old Galileo, and his 
abjuration compelled under menace of the torture, can be laid to the 
charge of Protestants, as regards the treatment accorded to the devotees 
of natural science. But Protestantism has to acknowledge that the same 
sort of mistake has been made, with circumstances less tragic and sig- 
nal, by professed advocates of a larger liberty of thought. From the 
first rise of geology, down to a recent day, the students of this branch 
of science have had to fight their way against an opposition conducted 
in the name of religion and of the Bible. They were charged with a 
presumptuous attempt to contravene the plain teaching of revelation. 
Cowper, in satirizing the dreams and delusions which get hold of the 
minds of men, does not omit to castigate those who 

" Drill and bore 
The solid earth, and from the strata there 
Extract a register, by which we learn 
That He who made it, and revealed its date 
To Moses, was mistaken in its age." 

There is no doubt that the amiable poet intends to pour scorn upon 
the theory that the globe is more than about six thousand years old, — 
a theory then novel, but now universally accepted. The geologists 
were flying in the face of Moses : they were audaciously setting up their 
pretended record, dug out of the earth, against the Creator's own testi- 
mony, given in writing. What could indicate more palpably the arro- 
gance of reason ? How many pulpits thundered forth their denunciation 



APPENDIX 437 

of the impious fiction of the geologists! The most recent instance of 
mistaken religious zeal in a blaze against the naturalists is furnished by 
the advent of Darwinism. The recollection is still fresh of the anathe- 
mas which the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent 
of Man provoked. 

The causes of the attitude of intolerance which has frequently been 
taken by religious men toward new opinions in natural science are mul- 
tiple. There is, first, the customary impatience of new truth, or of new 
doctrine which stands in opposition to cherished ideas, — ideas that have 
long had a quiet lodgement in the mind. This species of conservatism 
is far from being peculiar to theologians or to the religious class : it be- 
longs to other classes of human beings as well, and is manifested equally 
in connection with other beliefs. The path which scientific discoverers 
have to tread, apart from the religious and ecclesiastical jealousies which 
they are liable to awaken, is not apt to be a smooth one. Every impor- 
tant revolution in scientific opinion has succeeded, not without a conflict 
with the adherents of the traditional view, — an internecine war among 
the cultivators of science themselves. 

Then, secondly, religious faith, as it exists in almost every mind, is 
habitually associated with beliefs erroneously supposed to be implicated 
in it. Religious beliefs, in the average mind, are so interwoven with 
one another, as the mere effect of association, where there may be no 
necessary bond of union, that where one of them is assailed, the whole 
are thought to be in danger. Time was, when a belief in witchcraft 
was held by many to be an articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesicB. Even 
John Wesley expresses this opinion, or something equivalent. It was a 
belief that had existed so long, it had been adopted and practised on by 
so many of the good and bad, it was judged to be so recognized in the 
Scriptures, it entered so intimately into the accepted mode of conceiving 
of supernatural agents, that the loss of it out of the faith of a Christian 
was felt to be like a displacement of a stone from the arch : it would lead 
to the downfall of the whole structure. The old Greeks held that the 
stars were severally the abode of deific beings : they were animated and 
moved by intelligences. Plato and Aristotle were not delivered from this 
way of thinking. When a man like Anaxagoras said that the sun was 
a stone, the entire theological edifice was felt to be menaced with over- 
throw. Men did not at once discern that atheism did not follow. The 
disposition "to multiply essentials" good Richard Baxter considered 
the bane of the Church, the prolific source of intolerance and division. 
The tendency to identify accident with substance, the failure to discern 
the core of a truth from its integuments, is at the root of much of the 
rash and unreasoning and vehement resistance that has been offered in 
past times to the advances of natural science. 

After these preliminary remarks on the causes of complaint which 
students of nature have had in times distant and recent, we proceed to 



438 APPENDIX 

affirm that the general allegation against religion and Christianity, of 
having proved a hindrance to the advancement of scientific knowledge, 
is without a just foundation. In the patristic age, in the history of 
ancient Christianity, writers can find little that can help them to bolster 
up their fictitious charge. To understand the middle ages, one must 
take into view the domination of Aristotle, which, partly for good and 
partly for evil, established itself in the thirteenth century in the educated 
class. At first Aristotle was resisted, especially when the Arabic Panthe- 
ism linked itself to his teaching ; but finally he came to be considered 
as a chosen man who had exhausted the possibilities of natural reason. 
Considering what the character of civilization was in that era, the influ- 
ence of the Stagirite was natural, and not without a great intellectual 
benefit. With the Reformation, his sceptre was broken. The way was 
opened by this emancipation for the progress of physical and natural 
science. The epochs in this great emancipation are marked by the 
advent of the voyagers Columbus and Da Gama, by the discoveries of 
Copernicus and Vesalius, by the revolution effected by Newton, by the 
extension of astronomical science through the elder Herschel, and by 
the final triumph of the method of experimental and inductive research 
which owed much to the influence of Bacon, but the glory of which 
must be shared by a multitude of explorers. To figure this progress of 
culture, through Aristotle's reign and since his downfall, as a "conflict 
with religion," is a proceeding as shallow as it is calumnious.^ 

The indebtedness of science to the Arabs is often overstated. Nesto- 
rians were the tutors and guides of the Arabs. Alfarabi and Avicenna 
were pupils of Syrian and Christian physicians. In the ninth century, 
Hassein Ibn Ishak was at the head of a school of interpreters at Bag- 
dad, by whom the Arabs were furnished with the treatises of the Stagi- 
rite and of his ancient commentators.^ Thirdly, the additions which 
the Arabs made to the stock of learning were comparatively small. We 
say "comparatively." In comparison with what they learned from the 
Greeks, their contributions were small ; but, especially in comparison 
with the scientific achievements of Christian students of later days, the 
discoveries of the Mohammedans were insignificant. Whewell, in his 
History of the Inductive Sciences^ has brought out very distinctly the 
fact that it was not until scientific discovery and experiment were taken 
up under Christian auspices and by Christian explorers, that the aston- 
ishing advances were made which give character to modern science. In 
astronomy, the favorite study of the Arabs, and one in which they really 
did much, what is all their original teaching when set by the side of the 
work done by Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Newton? 

1 Zockler's work, Gesch. d. Beziehungen d. TheoL u. Naturwissenschaft 
(1877), contains interesting matter on the points here considered. 

2 See Ueberweg's Hist, of Philosophy, i. pp. 410 seq. 



APPENDIX 439 

The methods, the instruments, the observation, the brilliant inductions, 
which have revolutionized our conceptions of the sidereal universe, are 
not due to the Arabs. They are owing to the genius of the Christian 
masters whose names have just been given, and to others who have trod 
in their path. It is in the atmosphere of Christianity, amid the influ- 
ences which Christian civilization has originated, in the bosom of 
Christian society, that the amazing progress of natural and physical 
science in all of its departments has taken place. To hold the Church 
at all times, much more Christianity itself, responsible for every deed of 
cruelty and fanaticism which the rulers of the Church committed, is a 
manifest injustice. 

A fallacy still more flagrant, of which the class of writers whom we 
have in mind are guilty, is deserving of special attention. These 
writers unconsciously overlook the fact that, for the most part, the 
pioneers of scientific discovery who have had to endure persecution 
for broaching novel views upon the constitution and origin of nature 
have been themselves Christians. It has not been a war of dis- 
believers and sceptics, on the one side, who have been obliged to 
suffer at the hands of believers in Christianity for teaching scientific 
truth. It has commonly been a contest of Christian against Christian. 
Where there has been a combat of this sort, it has been an intestine 
struggle. Where the war has existed, it has been a war of Greek 
against Greek. Christian men, taught in Christian schools, or stimu- 
lated intellectually by the aggregate of influences which Christianity 
has in the process of time, to a great degree, called into being, make 
some new discovery in science, which clashes with previous opinions, 
and strikes many as involving the rejection of some article of Christian 
belief. Debate ensues. Intemperate defenders of the received opinion 
denounce those who would overthrow it. Intolerant men, if they have 
the power, instigated by passion, and probably thinking that they are 
doing God service, resort to force for the purpose of suppressing the 
obnoxious doctrine, and crushing its advocates. These advocates, 
denying that Christianity is impugned by their new scientific creed, 
stand, with more or less constancy, for the defence of it. 

If all that has been said of the opposition offered in past times 
to scientific progress by Christian people were true, no conclusion 
adverse to the truth of Christianity could be inferred. To justify such 
a conclusion, it would be necessary to prove that the Christian faith, 
the doctrine of Christ and of his redemption, carries in it by natural or 
necessary consequence this antipathy. It might be that the professed 
adherents of a religious system fail, in numerous instances, to apprehend 
in certain particulars its true genius. They may identify their own 
preconceptions with its actual teaching. They may misinterpret that 
teaching in some important aspects of it. They may carry their own 
ideas into the sacred books, instead of receiving their ideas from them. 



440 APPENDIX 

They may fail to apprehend clearly the design and scope of their 
sacred writings, the character and limits of their authority. They may 
cling to the letter, and let the spirit, in a measure, escape them. They 
may fail to separate between the essential and the accidental in their 
contents, the truth and the vehicle which embodies it. Unless it can 
be shown, then, that Christianity involves a view of the material world 
and of its origin, of the laws of nature and its final cause, and of man, 
which is at variance with the results of natural investigation, nothing 
which the adherents of Christianity have said or done in this matter is 
of vital moment. That Christianity, fairly understood and defined, 
involves no such contradiction to scientific behef is capable of being 
proved. 

A sense of the beauty and sublimity of nature pervades the Bible. 
The keen relish of the Hebrew writers for the grand and the lovely 
aspects of nature is specially manifest in the Psalms and prophets. 
The starry sky, forest, and mountain, and sea, filled the Israelite's heart 
with mingled awe and rejoicing. Nor was he insensible to the in- 
fluence of gentler sights and sounds, — to the bleating of the flocks 
on the hillside, the songs of birds, the flowers and fruits with their 
varied colors. That sort of asceticism which turns away from nature as 
something, if not hostile to the spirit, yet beneath man's notice, is in 
absolute contrast with the tone of the Scriptures. The religion of the 
Hebrews, not less than the religion of the New Testament, looking 
on the visible world as the work of God and a theatre of his incessant 
activity, allowed no such antipathy. It left no room for a cynical 
contempt or disregard of external beauty. The glowing descriptions 
of poets and seers, reflecting the spontaneous impressions made by 
nature on souls alive to its grandeur and its charm, naturally inspired 
an appreciation of that kind of knowledge which was ascribed to the 
king who " spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even 
unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall : he spake also of beasts, 
and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes " (i Kings iv. 33). 

The unity of nature is presupposed in the Scriptures. It is the 
correlate of the strict monotheism of the Bible. There is no divided 
realm, as there is no dual or plural sovereignty. Humboldt refers to the 
hundred-and-fourth Psalm as presenting the image of the whole cosmos : 
" Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment : who stretchest 
out the heavens like a curtain : who layeth the beams of his chambers 
in the waters : who maketh the clouds his chariot," etc. " We are 
astonished," writes Humboldt, " to find in a lyrical poem of such a 
limited compass the whole universe — the heavens and the earth — 
sketched with a few bold touches. The calm and toilsome labor of 
man, from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, when his 
daily work is done, is here contrasted with the moving life of the 
elements of nature. This contrast and generalization in the concep- 



APPENDIX 441 

tion of the mutual action of natural phenomena, and this retrospection 
of an omnipresent, invisible power, which can renew the earth, or 
crumble it to dust, constitute a solemn and exalted, rather than a 
glowing and gentle, form of poetic creation." It " is a rich and ani- 
mated conception of the life of nature." ^ This one thought of the 
U7iity of nature is not an induction, but an intuitive perception involved 
in the revealed idea of God, and gives to science by anticipation one 
of its imperative demands. 

Not only does the Bible proclaim the unity of nature ; it views 
nature as a system. 

In the first place, the operation of " natural causes " is recognized. In 
the story of the creation, every sort of plant and tree was made to yield 
" fruit after its kind, whose seed is ifi itself; " and every class of animals, 
to produce offspring "after its kind." One has only to look at Job 
and the Psalms to convince himself that the reality of nature and of 
natural agents is a familiar thought to the sacred writers. It is true 
that these writers are religious : they do not limit their attention to the 
proximate antecedent : they go back habitually to the First Cause. 
If they do not speculate about " second causes," they recognize the order 
of nature. They may often leap over intermediate subordinate forces, 
and attribute phenomena directly to the personal source of all energy. 
This involves no denial of secondary, instrumental means, but only of an 
atheistic or pantheistic mode of regarding them. If we say that Erwin 
von Steinbach built the spire of the Strasburg Cathedral, we do not 
mean that stones and derricks were not employed in the construction 
of it. We simply trace it immediately to him whose plan and directive 
energy originated the structure. When the Bible says that " by the 
word of the Lord were the heavens made," there is involved no denial 
of the nebular theory. Hardly any assertion relative to the subject is 
more frequent than that the Scriptures recognize no natural agencies. 
It is unfounded. It springs from a dull method of interpreting religious 
phraseology, and from a neglect of multiplied passages which teach the 
contrary. 

Not only are natural causes recognized : nature is governed by law. 
Its powers are under systematic regulation. To the Hebrew poet, says 
Humboldt, nature "is a work of creation and order, the living expres- 
sion of the omnipresence of the Divinity in the visible world." ^ There 
are no dark realms given up to unreason and disorder. Everywhere 
the power and wisdom of the Most High have stamped themselves on 
the creation. The same writer from whom we have just quoted 
remarks of the closing chapters of the Book of Job : " The meteoro- 
logical processes which take place in the atmosphere, the formation 
and solution of vapor, according to the changing direction of the wind, 

^ Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 412 (Bohn's ed.). 



442 APPENDIX 

the play of its colors, the generation of hail and of the rolling thunder, 
are described with individualizing accuracy : and many questions are 
propounded which we, in the present state of our physical knowledge, 
may indeed be able to express under more scientific definitions, but 
scarcely to answer satisfactorily." ^ In these chapters of Job the 
mysteries of nature are set forth in connection with the reign of law 
and the impressive demonstration afforded by it of the inexhaustible 
wisdom and might of the Creator and Sustainer of all things. The 
waters in their ebb and flow, the clouds in their gathering and their 
journeys, the stars and constellations in their regular motion, the course 
of the seasons, the races of animals, with the means given them for 
safety and subsistence, in a word, every department of the physical 
universe, is brought into this picture of the ordered empire of Jehovah. 
Looking at the Scriptures as a whole, we may say that, so far from 
contradicting science in their views of nature, they anticipate the fiin- 
damental assumptions of science which induction helps to verify, and 
that nothing in the literature of the remote past is so accordant with 
that sense of the unity, order, not to speak of the glory, of nature, 
which science fosters, as are the Sacred Writings. 

It was to be expected that a revelation having for its end the moral 
deliverance of mankind would abstain from authoritative teaching 
on matters relating to natural science, except so far as they are 
inseparable from moral and religious truth. Theism, as contrasted 
with atheism, dualism, pantheism, and polytheism, is a fundamental 
postulate of revelation and redemption. That the only living God has 
created, upholds, and dwells in the world of nature, that the world in 
its order and design testifies to him, that his providence rules all, are 
truths which enter into the warp and woof of the revealed system. 
So man's place in creation, his nature, sin as related to his physical 
and moral constitution, the effect of death, are themes falling within 
the scope of revealed religion. In general we find that the Bible con- 
fines itself to this circle of truths. The ideas of nature, apart from its 
direct religious bearings, are such as contemporary knowledge had 
attained. The geography, the astronomy, the meteorology, the geology, 
of the scriptural authors are on the plane of their times. Copernicus 
and Columbus, Aristotle and Newton, are not anticipated. The Bible 
renders unto science the things of science. The principal apparent 
exception to this procedure is in the somewhat detailed narrative of 
creation in the first chapter of Genesis. 

Respecting this passage, it deserves to be remarked that elsewhere 
in the Old Testament no stress is laid upon the details as there found. 
The allusions to the origin of things in Job, the Psalms, and Proverbs 
do not exhibit the succession of organic beings in just the same order. 

1 Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 414. 



APPENDIX 443 

Even in the hundred-and-fourth Psalm, where the same order in the 
works of creation appears, — the writer having in mind the Genesis 
narrative, — no weight is attached to the number of days.^ 

If we glance at the history of the interpretation of this passage, we 
shall find that the meaning given to it in different periods is generally 
matched to the science of the day. From Philo and Origen the alle- 
gorical treatment spread in the ancient Church, and prevailed in the 
middle asres. Augaistine considered that the works of creation were 
in reality simultaneous, or that creation is timeless. His view was that 
time begins with creation. 

Since the rise of modern astronomy and geology, new difficulties have 
arisen. The physical system, as conceived by the Genesis writer, is 
said to be geocentric. The origination of the luminaries above, of the 
earth and of the organized beings upon it, seems to be placed at an 
epoch only a few thousand years distant, and to be represented as taking 
place in a few days. On the contrary, geology, to say nothing here of 
ethnological and archaeological science, shows that the system of things 
has come into being gradually, that creation stretches over vast periods 
in the past. Enough has been said already to indicate how groundless 
are the objections which spring merely from inattention to the religious 
point of view of the biblical writers. The First Cause is brought into 
the foreground : proximate antecedents are passed over. The features 
of the Genesis narrative which appear to clash with science are chiefly 
the order of succession in creation, and the chronological statements. 

Various hypotheses for the reconcilement of Genesis and science 
may be left unnoticed, for the reason that they are either given up, or 
deal too largely in fancy to merit serious consideration. There is one 
theory, however, which still has its advocates, and is entitled to a 
hearing. It is that which looks on the Genesis narrative as an epitome 
of the history of creation, " days " being the symbolical equivalent, or 
representative, of the long eras which science discloses ; there being, 
however, a correspondence in the order of sequence, — a correspondence 
of a very striking character, and giving evidence of inspiration. It is 
not supposed that the facts of science were opened to the view of the 
writer of the first chapter of Genesis ; but he saw, possibly in a vision, 
or through some other method of supernatural teaching, the course of 
tilings in their due order. The length of time really consumed in the 
process, he, perhaps, may have been as ignorant of as were his readers. 
Plausible as this theory may appear to some, and supported though it 
has been by distinguished names in science, as well as in theology, it 
has to encounter grave difficulties. Equally learned naturalists in large 
numbers regard the alleged correspondence in the order of events as 

1 See Dillmann, Die Genesis, p. 12 ; cf. Isa. xxvi. 7-10, xxxviii. 4 seq.; 
Prov. viii. 24 seq. ; Ps. xxiv. 2. 



444 APPENDIX 

unreal, or as effected by a forced interpretation of the narrative. With 
these naturalists many judicious critics and exegetes are agreed. The 
matching of the narrative to the geological history is thought to require 
a more flexible and arbitrary understanding of words and phrases in the 
former than a sound method of hermeneutics will sanction. ^ Another 
circumstance which tends to give a precarious character to the hypothe- 
sis in question is the documentary composition of Genesis. ' It is gener- 
ally agreed that there are two distinct accounts of the creation, from 
somewhat different points of view, placed in juxtaposition. The hand 
of the compiler is plainly seen. The new light upon Oriental history 
and religions which has been obtained raises additional doubt as to the 
tenableness of the hypothesis of which we are speaking. A mistake 
has often been made, especially by naturalists, in assuming that the first 
chapter of Genesis stands by itself, instead of being one of a series of 
narratives which extend over the earlier portion of the book, and must 
be examined and judged as a whole. It is ascertained that narratives 
bearing strong marks of likeness to these were current among the other 
Semitic peoples with whom the Israelites were related, — among the 
Phoenicians, and among the Babylonians and Assyrians. How far 
back can the purer or the Genesis form of these narratives be traced ? 
Are they to be considered the original, most ancient form of traditionary 
belief, of which the other Semitic legends are a corruption? One thing 
is evident, that the expurgation and ennobling of these hoary traditions 
must hcve been the work of minds illuminated by divine revelation. 
The divine or inspired element in the Genesis narrative of the creation 
would thus be made to consist in the exclusion of elements at war with 
the religion of Israel, and in the casting of the ancient story into a 
shape in which it should become a vehicle of communicating, not scien- 
tific truth, but the great religious ideas which form the kernel of the 
Mosaic revelation. It cannot be denied that this would be an impor- 
tant step taken in the deliverance of the Israelites from polytheistic 
superstition. This was enough to effect on that stage of revelation. To 
substitute a scientific cosmogony for the inherited beliefs of the early 
Israelites would require magic rather than miracle. It would be either 
a supernatural teaching of what it belongs to the inquisitive mind of 
man and the progress of science to discover, or it would be a kind of 
inspired riddle, the meaning of which could not be in the least divined 
— in this respect differing from prophecy — until science had rendered 
the ascertainment of its meaning superfluous. 

No theory of evolution clashes with the fundamental ideas of the 
Bible as long as it is not denied that there is a human species, and that 
man is distinguished from the lower animals by attributes which we 
know that he possesses. Whether the first of human kind were created 

1 See Dillmann, p. Ii. 



APPENDIX 445 

outright, or, as the second narrative in Genesis represents it, were 
formed out of inorganic material, out of the dust of the ground, or were 
generated by inferior organized beings, tlirough a metamorphosis of 
germs, or some other process, — these questions, as they are indifferent 
to theism, so they are indifferent as regards the substance of bibhcal 
teaching. It is only when, in the name of science, the attempt is made 
to smuggle in a materialistic philosophy, that the essential ideas of the 
Bible are contradicted. 

As regards the idea of creation, or the origin of things by the act of 
God's will, it is a point on which science is incompetent to pronounce. 
It belongs in the realm of philosophy and theology. Natural science 
can describe the forms of being that exist, can trace them back to ante- 
cedent forms, can continue the process until it arrives at a point beyond 
which investigation can go no farther; then it must hand over the 
problem to philosophy. To disprove creation would require an insight 
into the nature of matter and of finite spirit such as no discreet man of 
science would pretend for a moment to have gained. This question, 
too, the question what constitutes the reality of things perceived, is a 
problem to the solution of which natural science lends a certain amount 
of aid, but which metaphysics and theology have at last to determine as far 
as the human faculties make it possible. Christianity touches the domain 
of science in the Christian doctrine of physical death as the penal con- 
sequence of sin. Do not all living things die? Do not the animals, 
those whose organization most resembles that of man, perish at the end 
of an allotted term ? Are not the seeds of dissolution in our physical 
constitution? Do not the Scriptures themselves dwell on man's natural 
frailty and mortality ? Does not an apostle — the same who asserts that 
death came in through sin — speak of the first man as of the earth, and 
mortal ? 

The narrative in Genesis does not imply that man was immortal in 
virtue of his physical constitution. It teaches the opposite. Its doc- 
trine is that had he remained obedient to God, and in communion with 
him, an exemption from mortality would have been granted him. Not 
only would he have been spared the bodily pains which sin directly en- 
tails through physical law, and the remorse and mental anguish which 
are " the sting of death," but he would have made the transition to the 
higher form of life and of being through some other means than by the 
forcing apart of soul and body. The resurrection of Jesus, and 
the promised resurrection of his followers, is the giving of a renewed 
organism — "a spiritual body'* — in the room of "flesh and blood." 
The idea is that of a restoration to man of a boon which he forfeited 
through sin. It is the idea of a development into a higher mode of 
existence, reached by a process less violent and more natural than the 
crisis of death. The science which is adventurous enough to find Plato's 
Dialogues and Shakespeare's plays in the sunbeams will hardly assume 



446 APPENDIX 

to deny the possibility of such a transmutation. Christianity does not 
permit sin, and the effects of sin on human nature, to be hghtly esti- 
mated. A moral disorder, a disorder at the core of man's being, brings 
consequences more portentous than are dreamt of in the philosophy 
which will not recognize this terrible but patent fact. It is true that the 
lower animals die. But man is distinguished from them. He is more 
than a sample of the species. He is an individual. He includes, in his 
principle of life, rationality, conscience, affinity to God. If he were 
nothing but an animal, then it might be irrational to think of his escap- 
ing the fate of the brute. But, being thus exalted, there is no absurdity 
in conceiving of such an evolution from the lower to the higher stage 
of existence, as robs death of the dread associated with it — an evolution, 
however, conditioned on his perseverance in moral fidelity and fellow- 
ship with God. When the Scriptures speak of human weakness, frailty, 
and mortality, it is to mankind in their present condition, with the con- 
sequences of sin upon them, that they refer. 

The Scriptures point forward to the perfecting of the kingdom of God, 
the consummation of this world's history. The physical universe is not 
an end in itself. It is subservient to moral and spiritual ends. It is not 
to remain forever in its present state. It is to partake in the redemption. 
The material system is to be transfigured, ennobled, converted into an 
abode and instrument suited to the transfigured nature of the redeemed. 
'^ Without the loss of its substantial being, matter will exchange its 
darkness, hardness, weight, inertia, and impenetrability for clearness, 
brilliancy, elasticity, and transparency."^ The mystery that overhangs 
this change is no ground for disbelief. As far as physical science has 
a right to speak on the subject, it furnishes arguments for the possibil- 
ity of such an evolution, and corroborates the obscure intimations of 
Scripture. 2 

The remark is not unfrequently heard, that, though there may be no 
positive dissonance between science and Scripture, yet the whole con- 
ception of the universe which science has brought to us is unlike that 
of the biblical writers, — so unlike, that the biblical doctrine of redemp- 
tion is made incredible. The earth, instead of being the centre of the 
sidereal system, is only a minute member of it. It is, one has said, but 
" a pinpoint " in the boundless creation. Consequently, man is reduced 
to insignificance. How can we imagine a mission of the Son of God, 
an incarnation of Deity, in behalf of a race inhabiting this little sphere? 
The incredibility of the Christian doctrine is heightened, we are told, 
by the probability, given by analogy, that other rational beings without 
number, possibly of higher grade than man, exist in the multitudinous 
worlds which astronomy has unveiled. 

^ Dormer, ChristL Glaubenslehre, ii. 973. 

^ See Tait and Stewart, The Unseen Universe. 



APPENDIX 447 

The whole point of this difficulty lies in the supposed insignificance 
of man. He who entertains such thoughts will do well to ponder cer- 
tain eloquent sayings of Pascal. What is the physical universe, with 
its worlds upon worlds, compared with the tJiought of it in man^s mind? 
Who is it that discovers the planets, weighs them, measures their paths, 
predicts their motions? Shall bulk be the standard of worth? Shall 
greatness be judged by the space that is filled? One should remember, 
also, the sublime observation of Kant on the starry heavens above us 
and the moral law within us, — one connecting us with a vast physical 
order, in which, to be sure, we occupy a small place, but the other bind- 
ing us to a moral order of infinite moment, giving to our spiritual being 
a dignity which cannot be exaggerated. As to possible races of rational 
creatures in other worlds, who, if they exist, can affirm that the mission 
and work of Christ have no significance for them? But, not to lose 
ourselves in conjecture, the objection is seen, on other grounds, to be 
without any good foundation. The existence of any number of rational 
creatures elsewhere does not diminish in the least the worth of man ; it 
does not lessen his need of help from God ; it does not weaken the 
appeal which his forlorn condition makes to the heart of the heavenly 
Father; it does not lower the probability of a divine interposition for 
his benefit. Shall the Samaritan turn away from one sufferer at the 
wayside, because myriads of other men exist, many of them, perhaps, 
in a worse condition than he? This method of reasoning and of feel- 
ing is quickly condemned when it is met with in human relations. It 
would deaden the spirit of benevolence. It is not less fallacious, and 
not less misleading, when applied to the relations of God to mankind. 

NOTE 23 (p. 343) 

It appears to be thought by many at present that the argument for 
Christian revelation from prophecy is of little weight. In treatises on 
Christian evidences, it has fallen into the background, or has disap- 
peared altogether. By some it would seem to be considered an objec- 
tion, rather than a support, to the Christian cause. This impression 
is due in part to wrong methods of interpretation that were formerly 
in vogue. 

Prophecy, looked at in the light of a more scientific exegesis and a 
larger conception of the nature of prophetic inspiration, furnishes a 
striking and powerful argument for revelation. 

One thing which modern theologians have learned respecting Hebrew 
prophecy is that prediction was not the exclusive, or even the principal, 
constituent in the poet^s function. The prophets were raised up to 
instruct, rebuke, w^arn, and comfort the Israel of their own day. They 
dealt with the exigencies and obligations of the hour. They were the 
spokesmen of God, consciously speaking to the people by his commis- 



448 APPENDIX 

sion, and through his Spirit inspiring them. Prediction was involved, 
both as to the near and the distant future. But, as we see from the 
case of the prophets of the New Testament church (i Cor. xiv. 24, 31), 
foretelhng was not the essential thing. The prophet was an inspired 
preacher. 

Another change in the modern view of prophecy is in the perception 
of the limitations to which the prophets were subject, as to the extent 
and the form of their vaticinations. Allegorical interpretation, in the 
form, for example, which ascribed to the language of the prophets a 
double or multiple sense of which they were conscious, or in the form 
which laid into their words a meaning at variance with their natural 
import, is now set aside. There is a broader view taken of the matter. 
The distinction between the inmost idea, the underlying truth, and the 
form in which it is conceived, or the imagery under which it is beheld, 
by the seer, is recognized. The central conception of the organic 
relation of the religion of the Old Testament to that of the New, the 
first being rudimental in its whole character, and thus in its very 
nature predictive, — just as a developed organism is foreshadowed in 
its lower forms or stages, — illuminates the whole subject. It suggests 
the limitations of view which must of necessity inhere in prophetical 
anticipation, even though it be supernatural in its origin. 

Prediction, in order to be an evidence of revelation, must be shown 
to be truly pre-diction, — that is, to have been uttered prior to the event 
to which it relates. On this point, as regards the Old Testament 
prophecies, there is no room for reasonable doubt. ^ The predictions 
must be shown not to spring from native sagacity, or wise forecast 
based on natural causes known to be in operation. And they must 
be verified to an extent not to be explained either by the supposition 
of accidental coincidence, or by supposing the effect to be wrought by 
the influence of the predictions themselves. 

If we glance at the prophets as they present themselves to our view 
on the pages of the Old Testament, we shall be helped to judge 
whether their predictions can endure the test of these criteria. 

A man was not made a prophet by virtue of any natural talents that 
he possessed, or any acquired knowledge. He might, to be sure, be a 
great poet ; but this of itself did not make him a prophet. The prophets, 
it is true, were not cut off from a living relation to their times. They 
did not appear as visitors from another planet. But what the prophet 
had learned, whether in '• the schools of the prophets " (when such 
existed, and if he belonged to them), or from the study of the law, and 
of other prophets who preceded him, did not fiirnish him with the 

^ If the late date of the Book of Daniel is accepted, its predictions, as far 
as they relate to events prior to the Maccabean age, must be left out of the 
account. 



APPENDIX 449 

message which he delivered. He was not Hke the rabbi or scribe 
of a later day. He did not take up his office of his own will. So far 
from this, he is conscious of being called of God by an inward call 
which he cannot and dare not resist. The splendid passage in which 
Isaiah recurs to the vision in the temple, when '' the foundations of the 
thresholds shook,*' and the Voice was heard to say, " Whom shall I 
send?" shows the awe-inspiring character of the divine call which set 
the prophet apart for his work (Isa. vi.). The true prophet is conscious 
of being called to declare, not the results of his own investigations or 
reflections, but the counsels and will of the Most High. He utters the 
word of God. It may be a message that runs counter to his own pref- 
erence, that excites the deepest grief in his soul, that overcomes him with 
surprise or terror; but he cannot keep silent. So conscious is he that 
he is not speaking out of his own heart, as do the false prophets, that 
at times he no longer speaks in propria persona as the deputy of God : 
God himself speaks, in the first person, by his lips. Yet as a rule, 
and especially in the later and higher stages of prophecy, the state 
of the prophet is not that of ecstasy. He is in full possession of 
reason and consciousness. He distinguishes between his own thoughts 
and words and the word of God. There is no bewilderment. The 
truth which he pours forth from a soul exalted, yet not confused, by 
emotion is not something reasoned out. It is an immediate perception 
or intuition. He is a seer : he hears or beholds that which his tongue 
declares. The intuition of the prophet cannot be resolved into a natural 
power of divination. What power of divination could look forward to 
the far remote consummation of the workings of Providence in history? 
The prophets give utterance to no instinctive presage of national 
feeling. Commonly their predictions are in the teeth of the cherished 
aspirations of the people. 

The prophets predicted events which human foresight could not 
anticipate. Yet there is no such correspondence between prediction 
and fulfilment, that history is written in detail in advance of the actual 
occurrences. There is no such identity as to disturb the action of 
human free-will, as it would be deranged if everything that man were 
to do and to suffer in the future were mapped out before his eyes. 
Moreover, the conditions under which the ideas given to the prophet 
necessarily shape themselves in his thought and imagination — which 
may be called the human side of prophecy — give rise to a greater or 
less disparity between the mode of the prediction and the mode of 
fulfilment. This will constitute an objection to the reality of prophecy, 
only to those who cannot break through the shell, and penetrate to the 
kernel within it. On this topic Ewald writes as follows : — 

"A projected picture of the future is essentially a presentiment, a surmise; 
i.e. an attempt and efTort of the peering spirit to form from the basis of a 
certain truth a definite idea of the form the future will take, and to pierce 
2G 



450 APPENDIX 

through the veil of the unseen : it is not a description of the future with 
those strict historical lines which will characterize it when it actually unfolds 
itself. The presentiment or foreboding advances at once to the general scope 
and great issue. Before the prophet who is justly foreboding evil, there rises 
immediately the vision of destruction as the final punishment; but probably 
this does not come to pass immediately, or only partially; and yet the 
essential truth of the threat remains as long as the sins which provoked 
it continue, whether it be executed sooner or later. Or when the gaze of the 
prophet, eager from joyous hope or sacred longing, dwells on the considera- 
tion of the so-called Messianic age, this hovers before him as coming soon 
and quickly; what he clearly sees appearing to him as near at hand. But the 
development of events shows how many hindrances still stand in the way of 
the longed-for and surmised consummation, which again and again vanishes 
from the face of the present : nevertheless, the pure truth that the consum- 
mation will come, and must come precisely under the conditions foretold by 
the prophet, remains unchangeably the same; it retains its force during every 
new period, and from time to time some part of the great hope finds its 
fulfilment. Further: the presentiment endeavors to delineate its subject- 
matter with the greatest clearness and definiteness, and, in order to describe 
really unseen things, borrows the comparisons and illustrations that are at 
hand from the past and popular ideas. To set forth the presentiment of evil, 
there occurs the memory of Sodom, or all the terrible things of nature; whilst 
for bright hope and aspiration, there is the memory of Mosaic and Davidic 
times. But the prophet does not really intend to say that only the things 
that occurred in Sodom, and under Moses and David, will recur, or that 
mere earthquakes and tempests will happen; but, using these comparisons, 
he means something far higher." i 

The prophet, beholding things future as if present, may leap over 
long intervals of time. Events may appear to him near at hand which 
are really distant. Thus, in Isaiah, the Messianic era follows im- 
mediately on the liberation of the Israelites from captivity. Round 
numbers may be used, — numbers having only a symbolical signifi- 
cance.^ Events may be grouped according to the causal rather than 
the temporal relation between them. 

On this matter of chronology, Ewald has suggestive remarks : — 

" The prophetic presentiment, finally, endeavoring in certain distressing 
situations to peer still more closely into the future, ventures even to fix terms 
and periods for the development of the events which are foreseen as certain; 
yet all these more definite limitations and calculations are so many essays 
of a peculiar class, to be conceived of and judged by their own nature and 
from the motive that produced them, to say nothing of the fact that every- 
thing that the prophet threatens or promises is conditioned by the reception 
which his advice and command, indeed, which his suppressed yet necessary 
and of themselves clear presuppositions, meet with. Accordingly, the pro- 

1 Ewald's Prophets of the Old Testament, vol. i. p. 36. 

2 Oehler, Theologie d. alten Tesiainent, p. 205. 



APPENDIX 45 1 

phetic picture in the end is not to be judged by its garments, but by the 
meaning of the thoughts and demands which is hidden within it; and it 
would be a source of constant misconception to conceive of and judge picture 
and presentiment otherwise than in accordance with their own pecuHar hfe 
and nature. Jerusalem was not destroyed so soon as Micah (ch. i.-iii.) fore- 
boded : nevertheless, inasmuch as the same causes which provoked that 
presentiment were not radically removed, the destruction did not ultimately 
fail to come. Literally, Jerusalem was neither besieged nor delivered exactly 
as Isaiah (ch. xxix.) foresaw: still, as he had foreseen, the city was exposed 
during his lifetime to the greatest danger, and experienced essentially as 
wonderful a deliverance. In the calculations (Isa. xxxii. 14 seq.^ comp. v. 10, 
xxix. 1-8, and especially v. 17), if the words are taken slavishly, there lies a 
minor contradiction, which, with a freer comparison of all the pictures as they 
might exist before the mind of the prophet, it is granted, quickly disappears. 
The punishment of Israel (Hos. ii.) consists in expulsion into the wilderness 
(ch. iii. scq^ ; it consists rather in other things, e.g. in being driven away 
to Assyria and Egypt. Yet all these presentiments were equally possible, and 
contain no contradiction, unless they are confounded with historical assertions 
or even express commands. As appears from Jer. xxvi. 1-19, at this period 
of Jewish history a correct feeling of the true meaning of prophetic utterances 
in this respect was still in existence, and they were not so misunderstood as 
they were in the middle ages, and as they still are in many quarters." ^ 

Closely related to the partial indifference to mere chronological 
relations which is seen, for example, in what is termed '' the perspective 
of prophecy," is another feature, — that of the gradual fulfilment, the 
preliminary and the completed verification, of predictions. Glowing 
ideals stir the soul of the prophet. The realization of them he may 
connect with personages already living or soon to appear, and with 
conditions with which he is conversant. In the ways anticipated by 
him they have in truth a verification, but one that falls far short of the 
prophetic vision. The accordance is real, but only up to a certain 
point : the discordance is too great to be removed by treating the 
prediction as an hyperbole. Hence the full verification is still looked 
for ; and it comes. The development of the religion of Israel brings in 
the complete realization of the grand idea which floated before the 
prophet's mind. This is not a novel theory of prophecy, peculiar to 
our day. Lord Bacon speaks of" that latitude which is agreeable and 
fimiliar unto divine prophecies ; being of the nature of their author, 
with whom a thousand years are but as one day ; and are therefore not 
fulfilled punctually at once, but have springing and gcrininant accom- 
plishment tJirougJiout many ages., though the height or fulness of them 
may refer to some one age." - The mind of the seer or psalmist was 
illuminated, so that the plan of Jehovah in the ordering of the past 

1 Ewald, p. 37. 

2 The Advancement of Learning, b. ii. (Spedding's ed., vi. 200). 



452 APPENDIX 

course of Israel's history, and the real import of the present conjunction 
of circumstances, were unveiled to his mind. From this point of view 
he glanced forward, and, illuminated still by the Spirit of God, he 
beheld the future unfold itself, — not, to be sure, as to the eye of the 
Omniscient, but under the limitations imposed by finite powers acting 
within a restricted environment. For prophetic inspiration is no 
operation of magic. An apostle represents the prophets as seeking 
earnestly to get at the meaning of their own prophecies, — " searching 
what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them 
did signify,'' etc.^ 

The Old Testament prophecies fall into two classes. The first em- 
braces the predictions of a Messianic character, especially those relating 
to the kingdom and the spread of it. The second includes prophecies 
of particular occurrences. 

We begin with the first class of predictions. The prophets look 
forward to a great salvation in the future, a period of rest and blessed- 
ness for the people.^ Sometimes this redemption is depicted as a great 
triumph over all the enemies of Israel, when the state appears in unex- 
ampled glory and splendor ; the land yielding abundant fruits, and all 
divine blessings being showered upon its inhabitants. In other prophe- 
cies the predominant feature is the moral : it is the forgiveness of sin, 
the prevalence of holiness and righteousness, on which the eye is fixed. 
Sometimes the great redemption is foreseen as a gift to the seed of 
Abraham, the nation of Israel. But in other places the prophets take 
a wider view, and describe the heathen nations as sharing in the bless- 
ing, and the kingdom as extending over the whole earth. Now the 
Redeemer is Jehovah himself; now the hope centres in a particular 
monarch, or on a class by whom the grand deliverance is to be achieved ; 
and again it is a person to appear in the future, a ruler of the family of 
David. The house of David is chosen to carry the kingdom to its con- 
summation : it stands in the relation of sonship to God. Then there is 
a limitation : the great promise is to be realized from among the sons 
of David. Finally, the prophetic eye fastens its gaze upon an individual 
in the dim future; as in Ps. ii., where the whole earth owns the sway 
of the king, who is the Son of God ; in Ps. Ixxii., where the coming and 
universal sway of the Prince of peace, and the succor afforded by him 
to the needy and distressed, are described ; and in Ps. ex., in which the 
conqueror of the earth unites with the kingly office that of an everlast- 
ing priesthood, — a priesthood not of the Levitical order. ^ Elsewhere 
(Isa. liii.) the great deliverance is expected through a suffering " servant 
of Jehovah," who dies not for his own sins, but for the sins of the peo- 
ple. First, the "servant of Jehovah" is spoken of as Israel collectively 

1 I Pet. i, II. 2 cf. Bleek, Einl. in d. Alt. Test, p. 329. 

8 Cf. Oehler, ii. 258. 



APPENDIX 453 

taken, then as the holy and faithful class among the people ; and finally, 
in this remarkable chapter, there is, not improbably, a farther step in 
individualizing the conception, and a single personage, in whom all the 
qualities of the ideal '* servant " combine in a faultless image, rises 
before the mind of the seer. 

This glimpse of the most general outlines of Old Testament prophecy 
cannot but deeply impress one who has any just appreciation of the 
religion of Jesus Christ, and of Christendom even as it now is, to say 
nothing of what may, not unreasonably, be expected in the future. 
Under these different phases of prediction, there is one grand expecta- 
tion, viz., that the religion of Israel will itself be perfected, and will pre- 
vail on the earth. Follow back the course of prophecy, and you find 
traces of this expectation — either sublime in the extreme, or foolhardy 
in the extreme, as the event should prove — in the earliest records of 
Hebrew history. Concede all that, with any show of reason, can be 
said about the variety in the ideals and anticipations of the Hebrew 
prophets, there remains enough of correspondence to them in the origin, 
character, and progress of Christianity, to suggest a problem not easy to 
be solved on any naturalistic hypothesis. Grant that the prophets had 
an intense conviction of the reality of Jehovah, of his power, and of his 
right to rule. This conviction, be it remembered, is itself to be accounted 
for ; but, taking this for granted, we find in it no adequate means of 
explaining the confident declaration that " the earth shall be filled with 
the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." ^ 
Why should they not have stopped with the anticipation of the down- 
fall and destruction of the Pagan nations? How could they tell that 
from Judaea a universal kingdom should take its rise? How could they 
overcome those obstacles to such an anticipation which the actual course 
of history, as it was going forward under their eyes, appeared to involve? 

Let the reader imagine that, twenty-five or thirty centuries ago, the 
mountain cantons of Switzerland were inhabited by tribes insignificant 
in numbers and strength, while extensive and powerful empires, like 
ancient Rome after the conquest of Carthage and the East, or modern 
Russia, are on their borders. Suppose that the people thus imagined 
to exist had a religion unique, and distinct from that of all other nations. 
Yet even in times when their little territory is ravaged by vast armies, 
and the bulk of its population dragged oflf into slavery, there arise 
among them men who, with all the energy of confidence of which the 
human mind is capable, declare that their religion will become universal, 
that it will supersede the gorgeous idolatries of their conquerors, that 
from them will emerge a kingdom which will overcome, and purify as it 
conquers, all the other kingdoms of the world. And suppose, further, 
that actually, after the lapse of centuries, from that diminutive, despised 

1 Hab. ii. 14 ; cf. Oehler, ii. 196. 



454 APPENDIX 

tribe of shepherds and herdsmen there does spring a development of 
religion which spreads, until it already comprehends all the nations 
that now profess Christianity ; there does spring a Legislator and Guide 
of men, whose spiritual sway is acknowledged by hundreds of millions, 
and to the progress of whose reign no hmit can be set : would not the 
correspondence, or the degree of correspondence, between those far-off 
predictions and the subsequent phenomena be a fact which is nothing 
short of a miracle? 

The second class of prophecies pertain to particular occurrences. In 
inquiring whether they were fulfilled, we have to consider the obscurity 
which, notwithstanding recent discoveries in archaeology, still belongs 
to the annals of the nations contemporary with Israel. We have to 
consider, moreover, that predictions of this sort were never absolute, 
in the sense that God might not revoke a sentence in case repentance 
should intervene. The Book of Jonah is designed partly to dispel the 
error that a verdict of God, because once announced, is irreversible. 
The prophets entreat that their own predictions may not be fulfilled, 
and their prayers sometimes avail. Nevertheless, the instances of the 
actual verification of prophecies of this kind, which could not have 
sprung from any mere human calculation and foresight, are so numerous, 
and of so marked a character, that the reality of a divine illumination 
of the prophet's mind cannot rationally be denied. ^ Such an instance 
is the prophecies of Isaiah respecting the rapidly approaching downfall 
of the kingdoms of Israel and Syria, which had cemented an alliance 
with each other, and of the failure of their project against Judah.^ 
Another instance in Isaiah is the failure of the powerful army of the 
Assyrian king, Sennacherib, in his siege of Jerusalem.^ Other examples 
are afforded by the definite predictions of Jeremiah respecting the 
return of the people from the exile. Such prophecies cannot be 
referred to any shrewd forecast on the part of the seers who uttered 
them. When, for example, the Syro-Israelitish alliance menaced 
Judah and Jerusalem, the peril was imminent, else it would not have 
been true of Ahab and of his subjects that "his heart shook, and the 
heart of his people, as the trees of the forest shake before the wind." * 
Apart firom the impossibility of foretelling such events, the naturalistic 
explanation presupposes a mental state in the authors of the prophecies, 
which is quite diverse from the fact. 

A class of critics attribute the Old Testament predictions exclusively 
to natural causes. In sustaining their thesis, they seek to show that the 
prophecies have failed of a fulfilment, to such an extent as to preclude 
the supposition that they were the product of revelation. To this end, 
as regards the general prophecies, they not only insist on attaching a 

1 See Bleek, Einl. in d. Alt. Test., p. 326. ^ Isa. xxxvii. 21 seq. 

2 Isa. vii. * Isa. vii. 2. 



APPENDIX 455 

literal sense to passages which point to the perpetual continuance of 
the nation of Israel, the final restoration of the Jews, the subjugation 
of their enemies, and the like ; but they refuse to consider these features 
of prophecy, which the event has not literally verified, as limitations in 
the perception of the prophet, not inconsistent with his inspiration. In 
other words, they commonly allow no medium between a stiff super- 
naturalism, which ascribes exact verity to the fortn of the prophet^s 
vaticination, and a bald theory of naturalism. This position is unphilo- 
sophical. It overlooks the fact that the vehicle of revelation is human, 
and fettered, to a degree, by natural conditions which the inspiring 
Spirit does not sweep away. To break through these limitations 
altogether would be to substitute a dictation at once magical and incom- 
prehensible for a divine illumination adapted to the mental condition 
and the environment of the recipient of it. The prophet Jeremiah 
(ch. xxxiii. i8), in a memorable passage, foresees a momentous change 
and advance in the religion of Israel. A "new covenant" is to be 
made with "the house of Judah," — so radical is this change to be! 
The law is to be written in their hearts, that is, the law is to be con- 
verted into an inward principle ; and there is to be a forgiveness of 
sin: "I will remember their sin no more." These cardinal features 
of the new dispensation, which Christianity, ages afterward, was to 
bring in, are thus summarily set forth with impressive emphasis. Yet 
the same Jeremiah says that "a man shall never be wanting to sit on 
the throne of David, nor Levites to offer sacrifice on the altar." ^ " The 
Jew," says Dr. Payne Smith, " could only use such symbols as he 
possessed, and, in describing the perfectness of the Christian Church, 
was compelled to represent it as the state of things under which he 
lived, freed from all imperfections." ^ In the last chapter of the Book 
of Isaiah ^ the prophet describes in an exulting strain the glorious days 
when there shall be, as it were, new heavens and a new earth ; when 
priests and levites shall be taken even from the Gentiles ; when the 
old forms of worship, with the exception of the new moon and the 
sabbath, shall have passed away ; and when " all flesh " shall worship 
before Jehovah. Yet here Jerusalem is conceived of as supreme, and 
the centre of worship. To break away absolutely from this conception, 
inconsistent though it be with the union of "all flesh " in the adoration 
of God, would have been to ascend to a point of view higher even than 
that which the apostles had attained for years after they began their 
ministry. Yet in these cases, according to Dr. Kuenen's method of 
viewing prophecy,* for example, the circumstance that the prophet 
failed to see the future in form and detail proves that what he did see 
was through his own unaided vision. This procedure implies an exclu- 

1 Jer. xxxiii. 1 8. * Isa. Ixvi. 20-23, cf. Ixii. 2, Ixv. 15. 

2 Speaker'' s Commentary^ in loco. * In his work on Prophecy. 



456 APPENDIX 

sion of the natural factor from revelation and inspiration, and is of a 
piece with one-sided conceptions of the supernatural in the Scriptures, 
which modern theology has set aside, or which are clung to only by 
rigid adherents of an obsolescent system. 

With reference to prophecies of particular events, — the second class 
of predictions, — the class of critics referred to are disposed to bind 
the prophets too closely to the letter of their predictions ; for example, 
in what they say of times and seasons. They do not allow sufficient 
weight to the conditional character that belongs to this species of pre- 
diction where retributive inflictions are concerned. If it can be shown 
that, in certain cases, prophecy failed of its accomplishment, this would 
not establish their main proposition, unless it could be proved that the 
cases where the prediction proved true may be considered the result of 
accident, or the product of natural foresight. A marksman may hit a 
target often enough to exclude the hypothesis of accident, even if he 
miss it occasionally. If he thus hits the mark when he is known to be 
blind, or when the target is out of sight, a miraculous guidance of the 
arrow must necessarily be assumed. But exceptions to the correspond- 
ence of event with prediction are not easily made out. The progress of 
historical research has removed difficulties in regard to some passages 
that were once thought to have remained unverified ; the passage, for 
example, in Isaiah, predicting the conquest of Tyre.^ 

The relation of the " false prophets " who condemned them may remind 
us of the theory of Grote and others respecting the relation of Socrates 
and Plato to the Sophists. But Grote's view of the Sophists breaks 
down under his own concessions that Socrates and Plato were great 
reformers ; working, not, like other teachers, for hire, but from a nobler 
impulse. Socrates and Plato differed from Protagoras and his followers 
in their principles, method, and spirit. But the disparity between the 
true and the false prophets was more radical. That among those who 
are denounced as " false prophets " were individuals not conscious of an 
evil intent, or actuated by a fraudulent purpose, may be true. This is 
the truth that is contained in Kuenen's view of the subject. But the 
statements of Kohler, which Kuenen himself quotes, go farther. There 
was a set of " false prophets," — " lying prophets," as they were called 
by the prophets of the canon. Those pretended prophets spoke, not 
by the command of Jehovah, but out of their own hearts. It was from 
no irresistible impulse from within that they uttered their smooth words. 
They flattered the vain hopes of kings and people. They cry " Peace! 
Peace!" when there is no peace. They do not disturb the people in 
their indolent self-indulgence. Frequently they are instigated by covet- 
ousness and greed of gain. This class of prophets were moved by a 
secular, to the comparative exclusion of a religious, spirit. It was na- 

^ See Cheyne's The Prophecies of Isaiah, i. 132. 



APPENDIX 457 

tional power and aggrandizement, rather than truth and righteousness, 
which absorbed their interest. Against this whole class the true prophets 
carry on a perpetual warfare. Unless these were guilty of gross slander 
and intolerance, magnifying differences of judgment into flagrant sins, 
Kuenen's view of the subject is defective. On the one side stood the 
"false prophets ^' and the people whom they deceived. But the true 
prophets generally faced a resisting and persecuting public opinion. 
"Who hath believed our preaching?" is their sad and indignant com- 
plaint. The psychological facts connected with the utterance of the 
prophetic oracles reveal their nature. Was the inward call of the true 
prophet — that overwhelming influence upon the soul, when the mighty 
hand of God was laid upon him — a delusion? And how shall it be 
explained that the prophet was often dismayed by the glimpses of the 
future that burst upon his vision, that he strove to turn away from the 
prospect, that he was driven to foretell what he himself dreaded, and 
begged God to avert? Shall these extraordinary experiences of the soul, 
so exceptional in their character, so powerful in their effect, be deemed 
a morbid excitement? or resolved into a mere play of natural emotion? 
Dr. Kuenen says truly that " the canonical prophets have struggled 
forward in advance of their nation and of their own fellow-prophets.^'^ 
"Struggled forward?" Dr. Kuenen professes to be a theist. Why 
should he apparently shut out the influence of the Spirit of God? Why 
not, even on the theory of an uplifting of a portion of a class above 
their fellows, attribute this phenomenon, which no discerning man can 
fail to regard as amazing, to a special unction from above? It may be 
allowed that there were natural qualifications which led to the choice of 
a prophet. His mental and spiritual characteristics fitted him to be the 
recipient of the divine influence. But to exclude or depreciate this 
divine influence appears more congruous with the Pelagian conceptions 
of deism than with a theism which recognizes God as immanent, and 
ever active in the realm of the finite. Ewald has pointed out in a strik- 
ing way the habit of the prophet to distinguish between what was given 
him and what he produced of himself, — a peculiarity which disproves 
the naturalistic hypothesis, unless one is prepared to consider the prophet 
a half-insane enthusiast. It is not to be thought, observes Ewald, that 
because, in passages, the prophet's "own /disappears in the presence 
of another /," he " really forgets himself, and begins to speak without 
self-consciousness, or ends in unconsciousness and fi"enzy." " Neither 
has his introduction of God, as speaking in the first person, sunk into a 
crystallized and idle habit." " But the prophet always starts from his 
own experience to announce what he has already seen in the spirit, and 
again ends with his own experience. Nor in the coiirse of his utter- 
a7ice does he ever lose the consciousness of the fine boundary lines between 
the divine and the human.'''' ^ 

1 p. 582. 2 77^^ Prophets, etc., p. 41. 



458 APPENDIX 

There were criteria for distinguishing the true prophet from the spuri- 
ous. The prophet might work a miracle ; but even this was no abso- 
lute proof, since the pretended prophet might at least seem to do the 
same. Nor was the correspondence of the event to the prediction a 
sure evidence of genuine prophecy. ^ But in the genuine prophet there 
was a sympathy in the depths of the soul with Jehovah and his law, and 
with the purpose of God in the course of history, the goal of which he 
saw in the far future. There was a power and majesty in the true 
prophets, which nothing but the presence of God's spirit could impart 
to them. " When the spirit of God lays hold of them, and compels 
them to speak, they demand obedience to their mere word. And as, in 
spite of all murmuring, the congregation of Israel in the main followed 
Moses, so neither the bitter hatred of the idolatrous party in Samaria, 
nor the vacillation of the king, could cripple the influence of Elijah and 
Elisha.2 So Saul at the head of his victorious army dared not with- 
stand the word of Samuel.^ So Eli bowed himself to the divine mes- 
sage ; * and David, in the midst of all his glory, endured the rebuke of 
Nathan.^ Without weapons, without the prestige derived from priestly 
consecration, without learning and human wisdom, the prophets demand 
obedience, and are conscious of the influence which they can exert over 
the men of power in the nation." ^ "A true prophet of God, by his 
prayers and his knowledge of God's will, by the warnings that he utters 
against perils and false enterprises; is ''the chariot of Israel, and the 
horsemen thereof; ' that is, like a shielding host of armed men." " On 
the other hand, their persons are so consecrated to God that it can 
naturally seem dangerous for simple mortals to come into near contact 
with these men of God, who may bring their guilt to the remembrance." 

Underlying Dr. Kuenen's views of prophecy is a deistic mode of 
thought. There is a reluctance to admit a direct agency of God in 
connection with spiritual phenomena of the most unique and impressive 
character. Yet in his work he allows an immediate act of God in con- 
nection with the separation of Abraham and the training of Moses.^ 
The Deity, in his system, if he comes in at all, comes in as a deiis ex 
machina. Hence he finds it difficult to conceive of grades of inspira- 
tion, of degrees in the agency of the supernatural, of lower and higher 
stages in prophetic illumination. The supposed difficulty of drawing a 
sharp line between natural divination and soothsaying, and the earliest 
phenomena of Hebrew prophecy, moves him to conclude that the latter, 
even in its grandest manifestations, springs wholly from the unassisted 
faculties of man, — which is like inferring, from the fact that we cannot 

^ Deut. xiii. i seq. ^ Kings xxi. 20 seq.^ 27 sec; 2 Kings iii. 13 seq» 

3 I Sam. XV. 21 * I Sam. ii. 27 seq. 

^ 2 Sam. xii. 13 seq.; cf. xxiv. II seq. ^ 2 Kings iv. 13. 

'^ I Kings xvii. 18, 24; 2 Kings iv. 9; I.uke v. 8. Schultz, p. 82I. 
^ Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel, p. 579. 



APPENDIX 459 

fix the exact point when a boy becomes a man, that no man exists, or 
that all men are boys. There is a latent postulate of a great gulf 
between the natural and the supernatural. It is true that prophecy, 
from lower beginings, mounted to a higher level. In the early history 
of Israel methods of divination were taken up by the people from their 
Canaanite neighbors. Like theism in general, like other institutions 
and practices in religion, the purifying power from above worked out 
the end by degrees. Some things, such as magic and sorcery, were 
always prosecuted. 

As a part of a deistic mode of view, the work of the prophets is con- 
fined by some to the origination of "an ethical monotheism." The 
New Testament system is the completion of this work. Redemption, 
the hope of the prophets, the hope realized in Christ, is left out in this 
description of the religion of the Bible. To one who adopts this inter- 
pretation of the significance of the work of Christ, the links of connec- 
tion between the religion of the Old Testament and the religion of the 
New, which the apostles perceived to exist, must appear unreal. Hence 
the exposition of the Old Testament system by the New Testament 
writers, their recognition of the typical character of the Old Testament 
institutions and rites, and their explanation of the prophecies, must 
seem to be a house built on the sand. First, there is a narrow concep- 
tion of prophecy, in which phraseology and form are put on a level 
with the grand, living ideas which they embody. Next, there is a 
narrow conception of Christianity as merely or chiefly a doctrine of 
ethical monotheism. Lastly, by way of corollary, the prophets did not 
prophesy, but are made by the apostles to prophesy only through a 
groundless and fancifiil understanding of their writings. 

There are prophecies in the New Testament as well as in the Old. 
The general predictions relative to the perpetuity, extension, and trans- 
forming influence of the Gospel, when one compares the circumstances 
under which they were uttered with the subsequent history of Christian- 
ity down to the present day, discover a knowledge more than human. 
The words of Jesus to the disciple Peter, " On this rock I build my 
church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it," are a 
declaration that, on a basis of belief in him as the Messenger and Son 
of God, a community was arising which no power could destroy. Con- 
sider who this Peter was to whom Jesus spoke, who Jesus was, as 
regards outward condition and resources, and the insignificance of his 
following, and then glance at the Christian Church, advancing from its 
obscure beginnings to victory over Judaic and Pagan opposition and 
to its present commanding place in human society ! The prediction 
that the Gospel would be like leaven in the world of mankind, like the 
smallest of seeds, evolving fi-om itself a lofty and spreading tree — who, 
not possessed of a discernment more than human, could have then 
foreseen that such an eflfect was to follow? Then there are particular 



460 APPENDIX 

predictions, of which the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem is, 
perhaps, the most remarkable. The sagacity of man might have 
judged that a desperate conflict was likely to break out between the 
Romans and the Jews, but who could have predicted with any assurance 
that city and temple would be reduced to a ruin? With this prediction, 
one should connect, in his recollection, the prophecy that the vineyard 
would be given out to other husbandmen, that the treasure of God's 
best gifts would pass into the custody of the Gentiles. The Founder 
looked forward to the death of Judaism and the birth of Christendom ! 
It is not to be overlooked that the prophecies which are referred to, 
like prophecies in general, are not pronounced as results of calculation, 
as probabilities founded on the examination of evidence on the one 
side and on the other. They are uttered in that tone of absolute con- 
fidence which belongs to an assured insight. It is the penetrating 
glance into the future of one to whom the counsels of Omniscience have 
been supernaturally revealed. 



INDEX 



Abbot, Ezra, 211, 215, 220, 225, 251, 

Abbott, E. A., 286, 426. 

Acacius, Bishop, no. 

Ambrose, 430. 

Anaxagoras, 59, 435. 

Anselm, 26. 

Ansgar, 424. 

Apollonius of Tyana, 424. 

Appian, 415. 

Aquinas, 398. 

Aristion, 227. 

Aristotle, 59, 64, 123, 126, 127, 128, 

437. 438. 
Arnold, Matthew, 143, 268. 
Arnold, Thomas, 424, 431. 
Augustine, 19, 93, 132, 398, 428, 429. 
Avicenna, 438. 

Bacon, Francis, 451. 
Bain, F. C, 247, 283. 
Basilides, 253. 
Baxter, Richard, 437. 
Becket, Thomas A., 426. 
Bede, 424. 

Bennett and Adeney, 261. 
Berkeley, Bishop, 137. 
Bernard of Clairvaux, 426. 
Beyschlag, 174. 
Bleek, 174. 
Boniface, 424. 
Bowne, B. P., 405. 
Bruno, 399. 
Bums, Robert, 403. 
Bushnell, Horace, 175. 
Butler, Bishop, 318, 407. 

Caesar, Julius, 140. 
Caird, E,, 22, 387. 
Calvin, John, 398, 419. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 92, 279, 
Carpenter, W. B., 51. 
Celsus, 226. 
Chase, F. H., 219. 
Chastel, no. 
Chillingworth, 322. 



286. 



387, 



Chrysippus, 129. 

Chrysostom, no. 

Cicero, 33, 44, 139, 140, 415. 

Clarke, Samuel, 26, 27. 

Cleanthes, 135. 

Clement of Alexandria, 209, 215, 222, 

223, 225, 250, 260. 
Coleridge, S. T., 21, 174, 393. 
Collins, 9. 
Comte, 68. 
Confucius, 119. 
Constantine, 112, 431. 
Cooke, J. P., 37. 
Cowper, 436. 
Cudworth, R., 34. 

Darwin, C. R., 37, 49, 50, 52, 53, 147, 396, 

437. 
Davidson, A. B., 329. 
Democritus, 129. 
Descartes, 2. 
Dillman, 443, 444. 
Dion Cassius, 415. 
Domer, I. A., 446. 
Drummond, 47. 
Dwight, Timothy, 275, 412. 

Eckermann, 91. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 93, 210. 
Ephraem Syrus, 222. 
Epictetus, 131, 132, 135. 
Epicurus, 129. 
Erskine, H., 147. 
Erskine of Linlathen, 56. 
Euemerus, 199, 393. 
Eusebius, 218, 428. 
Ewald, 270, 449, 450. 

Fairbairn, A. S., 398. 
Fiske, John, 17, 18, 76, 399. 
Flint, R., 27, 68. 
Forrest, 301. 
Fouill6e, M., 401. 
Francis of Assisi, 432. 
Eraser, A. C, 22, 167, 399. 
Froude, J. A., 209. 



461 



462 



INDEX 



Galileo, 436. 
Gibbon, E., 119, 207. 
Goethe, 91. 
Gray, Asa, 50, 54. 
Gregory Nyssa, 424. 
Gregory Thaumaturgus, 424. 
Grote, G., 279, 393, 456. 
Guizot, 106, 431. 
Gwatkin, H. M., 256. 

Hamilton, Sir W., 17, 75, 84, 85. 
Hamack, A., 205, 213, 218, 222, 254, 

264, 278, 285, 308. 
Harris, Samuel, 399. 
Hartmann, 399. 
Harvey, W., 35. 
Haug, 47. 
Haupt, 268, 411. 
Hegel, 59, 65, 66. 
Henslow, G., 40. 
Herbert, T. M., 14, 81. 
Hermas, 252. 
Hilgenfeld, 179, 249. 
Hippolytus, 215, 253, 263. 
Hobbes, 8, 9. 
Hofman, R., 223. 
Holtzmann, H. J., 223, 297. 
Holzenfeld, 179, 205, 211, 215. 
Hopkins, Edward, 391. 
Hort, F. J. A., 264, 277. 
Humboldt, Alex, v., 440. 
Hume, 58, 81, 169, 407. 
Hutton, R. H., 91, 293. 
Huxley, T. H., 7, 33, 37, 46, 50, 52, 53, 

170, 394. 395. 406. 

Ignatius, 201, 261. 

Irenaeus, 205, 207, 208, 209, 226, 252, 255, 

257- 
Isocrates, 119. 

James, William, 19, 20, 21. 
Janet, 36, 40, 41, 43. 
Jerome, 218, 251. 
John, " the Presbyter," 254, 257. 
Josephus, 186. 
Julian, Emperor, 431. 
Jiilicher, 249, 297, 306. 
Justin Martyr, 207, 211, 212, 217, 251, 
260. 

Kant, I., 13, 42, 58, 75, 83, 84, 167, 401, 

447- 
Keim, 144, 191, 198, 244, 249, 250. 



Kepler, 35. 
Koran, the, 323. 
Kuenen, 455, 457, 458. 

Lactantius, 431. 

Ladd, G. T., 4, 32, 37, 404. 

La Place, 36. 

Leibnitz, 398. 

Lekebusch, 408. 

Lightfoot, J. B., 132, 134, 179, 205, 208, 

225, 227, 249, 252, 254, 259, 260, 261, 

278. 
Lipsius, 224. 
Livy, 415. 
Locke, John, 83. 
Long, A., 388. 
Loofs, 196, 261, 286, 288. 
Lotze, 19, 23, 166. 
Lucretius, 43, 129. 
Luthardt, 303. 
Luther, Martin, 93, 247. 

McGiffert, 205, 258, 272, 305. 

Maine, Sir Henry, 391. 

Mangold, 244, 250. 

Mangold-Bleek, 211, 320. 

Mansel, 81, 85, 392. 

Marcion, 229, 253. 

Marcus Aurelius, 131, 132, 430. 

Martineau, J., 45, 54, 57, 67. 

Maurice, F. D., 427. 

Maxwell, Clerk, 15. 

Meyer, H. A. W., 179, 232. 

Mill, J. S., 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 32, 117, 317. 

Mohammed, 148. 

Mozley, J. B., 156, 179. 

Miiller, J., 16, 23. 

Miiller, K. O., 393. 

Miiller, Max, 388. 

Napoleon, 185. 

Neander, 139, 231, 240, 268, 295, 298, 

319,411,431. 
Newman, J. H., 425, 426. 
Newton, John, 112. 
Niebuhr, 432. 
Nitzsch, K. L, 23. 
Norton, Andrews, 211, 221, 225. 



Origen, 122, 183, 207, 

443- 
Owen, 48. 



224, 226, 428, 



Paley, W., 30, 174, 238, 391. 
Papias, 206, 226, 227, 228. 
Parmenides, 398. 



INDEX 



463 



Pascal, 93, 447. 

Paulus, 137, 199. 

Pfleiderer, 388. 

Philo, 284. 

Pierce, B., 34, 35. 

Plato. 19, 122, 123. 124, 125, 131, 140, 437. 

Plotinus, 137, 138, 398. 

Plutarch, 140, 415. 

Pollock, 66. 

Polycarp, 252, 254, 256, 258. 

Porphyry, 137. 

Porter, F. C. 278. 

Porter, N., 32. 

Pothinus, 208. 

Proclus, 137. 

Purves, G. T., 211, 212. 

Ramsay, W. M., 252, 278, 319. 

Rashdall, N., 405, 

Renan, 144, 149, 150, 158, 191, 201, 208, 

231, 236, 280, 432. 
Resch, 215, 410. 
Reuss, 319. 
R6ville, 257, 295. 
Rhys Davids, 148. 
Ropes, C. J. H., 205. 
Ropes, J. H., 215. 
Rothe, Richard, 175, 411. 
Royce, J., 54. 

Sadler, 212. 

Sainte-Hilaire, Barth61emy, 127. 

Sanday, William, 211, 212, 230, 234, 287, 

319- 
Schelling, 65, 393, 399. 
Schleiermacher, 16, 174, 194, 408. 
Schopenhauer, 399, 
Scotus Erigena, 398. 
Schiirer, 219, 294. 
Semisch, 211. 
Seneca, 132, 134, 136. 
Seth, A., 3, 401. 
Shakespeare, 135. 
Smith, G. A., 245, 295. 



Smith, Payne, 455. 
Smyth, Newman, 37. 
Socrates, 30, 121, 122. 
Sophocles, 70. 
South, Robert, 387. 

Spencer, Herbert, 6, 8, 10, 46, 70, 72, 73, 
74. 76. n. 78, 80, 81, 82, 85, 387, 389, 

399- 
Spinoza, 5, 7, 63, 64, 67, 81, 399. 
Stevens, G. B., 278, 299. 
Strauss, D. F., 144, 185, 200, 320, 432. 

Tacitus, 140. 

Tait and Stewart, 446. 

Tatian, 222. 

Taylor, Isaac, 157, 430. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 220. 

Tertullian, 206, 207, 217, 428. 

Thayer, J. Henry, 239, 410, 412, 413. 

Theophilus of Antioch, 251. 

Trendelenburg, 32. 

Tyndall, 69, 70. 

Ulrici, 18, 23, 81. 

Valentinus, 253. 
Von Hartmann, 52. 

Ward, James W., 36, 74, 75, 81, 396. 

Weiss, B., 157, 229, 232, 235, 272, 299,319. 

Weizsacker, 271, 308. 

Wendt, 241, 266, 272. 

Wesley, John, 13, 437. 

Westcott, B. F., 211, 234, 236. 

Whewell, 46, 438. 

Wild, N. L., 411. 

Williams, Monier, 148. 

Wundt, II. 

Xavier, Francis, 424. 

Zahn, 179, 205. 208, 218, 222, 223, 227, 

228, 229, 264, 273. 
Zeller, 170. 
Zeno, 129, 135, 136. 



,? 



DCT 18 1902 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

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